Breathe
by ZoeLang
Summary: Follows the lives of a brother and sister from the attack onward as they figure out life and survival in the new world. All OCs in the beginning, so don't expect to see the characters we all know and love for a while. AU after season 1.
1. Chapter 1: With Infinite Complacence

Author's Note: I've had this idea in my head for a while and have just gotten around to start actually writing it. Please bear with me while it takes me forever to update! I am a slow writer, partly due to perfectionism, so don't expect updates every day or anything. Has not been beta-ed, but if you would like to and this doesn't seem like a terrible story to you, feel free to PM me! Not even sure I want a beta at this point, but it can't hurt to put it out there. Any mistakes are my own, but please let me know in the reviews of anything you feel is stupid/weird/would never happen in the show/I got wrong/etc. As long as you are nice about it, I greatly appreciate ANY feedback, positive and negative, and will take it into consideration for future chapters, or in correcting errors in chapters already out. So thanks for reading that long intro and hope you enjoy!

Oh, and I don't own Falling Skies, the premise, or the characters you see on TV, but there are a whole bunch of characters in this story that you haven't seen on the show. I do own them. Please don't use them or repost this fic without permission. :-)

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><p>They were on their way to the annual family reunion at Aunt Rachel and Uncle Todd's when they first heard about the aliens.<p>

In the backseat of the car, Alexis had her iPod turned up to drown out whatever oldies her parents had on the radio. Head leaning on the window, she watched the scenery pass by as they sped up I-95. They had just passed Bridgeport, their unofficial halfway point, and she was grateful. The landscape kept her occupied in fits, but already she was getting restless. Six hours in a car did that to anyone – especially with her family in the car with her.

Her dad was driving; she could see him up front, rocking out to the music, reliving his younger days. Her mom was in the passenger seat, so Alexis couldn't see her, but Alexis guessed she was trying to restrain herself from strangling her husband – a good thing, too, because that might crash the car. Although at this point all of its occupants might not mind if it meant an end to the torture that was her dad's renditions of past hits. Corey had commented once that the only thing worse than his singing was a screeching cat dragging its claws across a chalkboard. They'd all laughed, but it wasn't too far from the truth in Alexis' opinion.

Corey was in the seat next to Alexis, zoned out to some handheld game. Alexis had never been into that stuff, but it was a staple of any long car ride for Corey. He was older by two years, a senior in high school, so she had long teased him about playing kids games – until she had realized all of her friends were playing them, too.

Alexis enjoyed reading over playing video games any day, but she'd already finished one book this road trip, so she was taking a break. Besides, reading and listening to loud music (the kind she used to drown out her dad with) was hard; the music was too distracting. She preferred a quiet place to read – her bedroom late at night when no one else was awake and she was long supposed to be asleep was usually it.

A smack to her arm abruptly brought Alexis out of her reverie. Scowling over at her brother, she mouthed, "What?" and pointed to her earbuds, indicating she was listening to music. She really didn't feel like turning her music down just so he could tell her which level he'd just beat on whatever game he was playing.

His face serious, he mimed at her to take out her earbuds and pointed towards the front seat. Furrowing her eyebrows at his insistence, she paused the music and took the earbuds out of her ears, "What do you want? Cuz, seriously, if I have to listen to Dad's idea of singing because you –"

"Shhh!" her mom said, turning her head to the backseat. "Listen!" She pointed, too, at the radio.

Must be important; her dad had stopped "singing" and her mom was also telling her to listen. Turning her attention to the radio, she realized she'd been talking over a man's voice.

"–no indication as of yet what the intentions of these beings might be. We do not yet know where they came from or why they came here, but efforts are underway to open a channel of communication between us and them."

"Robert," a woman's voice cut over the air, "we know there is one over New York City, but we are also getting reports in that these ships are appearing over other major cities across the nation. Do you know anything about these other ships? Can you fill us in on what's happening in other cities right now?"

"Well, Sandra, I know there are other ships in other cities, including Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Seattle, among numerous others, but at the moment we don't have any more information on them. As I said, we will be attempting to communicate with and, uh, start a conversation with whoever is controlling these ships. We will be extending a hand in greeting and are excited to see where this meeting will take us. Today marks the end of an era in which we wondered if we were alone in the universe. It marks the beginning of an era in which we can look up at the stars and know that there is more out there than we could have imagined."

"Well said, and thank you, Robert, for your time. We are all hoping for the best in this first contact."

"Thank you, Sandra."

"We will be returning in just a few minutes with Dr. Gary Sulzer from the University of Berkeley, California's Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence program, known as SETI, for an outline of the next steps of this meeting, which has long been on the minds of all those involved in SETI. In the meantime, please stay with us while your normal music program is resumed."

Suddenly some 80s metal song was blasting through the speakers again. Her dad turned it far down so that it was barely audible.

No one spoke for a few moments, each of them trying to absorb what they had just heard.

Then Corey grinned and said, "This is awesome! It's just like _War of the Worlds_!"

Alexis blurted out the first thing that came to her mind. "Which one? The book, the radio show, or one of the movies?"

He rolled his eyes and ignored her question, but Alexis really did want to know. There was a big difference. The radio show had been a hoax. But the book and every movie about it had been quite real (in canon, of course), and quite deadly. Neither possibility – hoax or real – appealed to her.

"George, do you think this could be real? Do you think it's really happening?" she heard her mom whisper in the front seat. Why she was whispering Alexis didn't know, because she and Corey could still hear her from the backseat.

Her dad was silent for a moment. "I'm not sure," he said carefully. "We'll have to wait until we get to Boston and check it out from there. If it's somebody pulling a prank, there'll be something about it online."

This seemed to satisfy her mother, at least for the moment. Alexis wondered if it was a hoax how anyone could pull anything like this off. Not spaceships in the sky – she had yet to see one of them. If this was a hoax, most likely it was just someone hijacking the airwaves – still a feat, but certainly not alien spacecrafts. Then it would be like the radio show. But if it were like the book, or one of the movies…

The car was void of discussion for a while after that. They kept the radio on in case there were more updates, though that was mostly for her parents. Alexis' attention was trained on her phone, only barely keeping an ear open in case anything interesting came over the radio. Her phone's internet connection kept cutting in and out as they sped up the interstate, the phone trying and failing to keep up with their pace. She'd get a signal for a few seconds before it would cut out again, sending her phone back to searching for a signal. Alexis sighed in frustration as yet another one of her texts failed to go through.

One of her friends back home, Bethany, had mass texted everyone to tell them about a ship over Philadelphia. Apparently it was hovering over Center City, and it was _massive_. _Not a hoax, then,_ Alexis thought, a thrill of excitement running through her. Opening her facebook page, she saw that almost every status update on her news feed from the last half hour was about the ships. Some of her friends and classmates were saying how it was all a big hoax, but others were posting pictures of the supposed alien ships. One came from a friend who had moved to Colorado last year, and another from a friend in Spain.

"Hey, guys! Maria says there's one of those ships over Madrid."

"CNN says they're in every major city across the world," Corey informed her, holding his phone up. "As you would say, that was _so_ five minutes ago!"

Alexis gave him a sour look. "I haven't talked like that since 3rd grade, nitwit."

"Whatever, nerd," he said, turning back to his phone.

Alex rolled her eyes and was about to go back to her own phone when she realized that the woman on the radio was talking again.

"And now we go live to Washington, D.C., where representatives are discussing what the United States' – and Earth's – response to these extraterrestrials should be. Jerry?"

"Thank you, Sandra. While no one has yet seen the ones piloting these ships, all experts are agreeing there can be no doubt that these are not of terrestrial origin. The president has called…"

Alexis spent the rest of the ride half-listening to the people on the radio prattle on, half-reading things on her phone. She found more pictures and a few short videos of people closer to the ships, and she didn't know what to make of them. Some of them were from farther away, so you could see the whole ship, but it was so far away that you couldn't make out any detail. She found a few that were from people right underneath the ships, and they showed lots of edges and contours in the hull of the ships, but Alexis didn't really know what she was looking at. She'd always been a sci-fi fan, but she didn't know what a _real_ spaceship looked like. No one did.

The whole situation had her hooked. She tried to imagine where these aliens might have come from, what they might look like, why they might be here. Astronomy and anything to do with space was one of her obsessions, so she spent the ride trying to recall any pertinent facts, like stars close to Earth that could have inhabitable planets.

They were somewhere past Hartford on I-84 when the ship entered their view. At first Alexis didn't even know she was looking at it. It was a blob barely above the horizon, and it was impossible to see any detail, but that she could see it from this many miles away spoke to its size. From here all she could discern was a long, thin structure, its length maybe about half the diameter of a full moon.

Alexis watched it as they drove up I-84, thankful she was on the passenger side, which allowed her to keep an eye on it out the window. By the time they hit I-90, it had grown a little in size, but it still wasn't even as big as the moon, and she certainly couldn't see any details. And then once they turned onto I-90, they were moving towards it almost head-on, so it was hard to get a decent angle to see. Every left curve of the road had Alexis jerking her head up to catch a glimpse of it through the glass.

Slowly but surely it grew larger on the horizon and she began to make out some of the features she'd seen online earlier. She still didn't know what to call anything, but she took it all in, memorizing everything she could. They were crossing I-495 now and while it had to be twice the size of the moon, it still clung stubbornly to the horizon. Too far away to get any decent pictures or video, she contented herself with imprinting their approach to the ship hovering over the city into her memory.

As they hit I-95, her dad announced nonchalantly, "Crossing over Yankee Division now; we should be there in about a half an hour."

Alexis stared at the back of his seat uncertainly. Didn't he see that they were approaching an _alien spaceship_? _He must really be stressing,_ she decided finally. He used to announce different points on their trip when they were younger, but he hadn't done it in quite a few years. Apparently he was reverting back to their elementary school days in wake of the news that aliens were real. That or he had simply forgotten how old his children were.

Turning back to the ship, Alexis realized that it had grown to almost the size of the Andromeda Galaxy. It was frustrating how large it now loomed yet how far away it still was. She didn't have control of the car and she knew her parents would never go to see the thing. They were the ones who sat at home and watched the news, not the ones on TV making it. Thinking a bit further, though, she realized she should be able to persuade her aunt to take her.

Mind made up to get a closer look at ground zero, Alexis took one last glance out at the ever-larger ship in the sky over Boston, leaned back in her seat, and smiled. It would be a weekend to remember.

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><p>AN: Boring first chapter, I know, sorry. Just trying to get everything set up. So…what do you think? Obviously nothing much has happened yet, but please drop me a line with what you think if you can! It means more than you know! Just please no flames. If you didn't like it, please tell me why, but there's no reason for your review to leave me in tears. ;-) Thanks!

Also, if you didn't know, the title of this chapter is from the introduction to Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" radio show. I'm fascinated with it and highly recommend reading the transcript, which can be found a couple places online (alas, I seem unable to put a link here *sigh*).


	2. Chapter 2: The Best Laid Plans

Author's Note: Thanks so much to everyone who read the first chapter, and to my one reviewer, SoccerGurl03! Please let me know what you think so far by reviewing or even PMing me; I'd love to know what I'm doing right, what I'm doing wrong, where you see this going, what you think of the characters, etc.

This chapter is more set-up, so it's also kinda slow, but I PROMISE the crap'll start hitting the fan next chapter. ;-) Thanks again!

Oh, and this chapter's title is from Robert Burns' poem "To a Mouse".

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><p>"So when can we go see the alien spaceship?"<p>

Her Aunt Rachel paused mid-peel, potato in one hand, peeler in the other.

Alexis looked at her expectantly. Maybe while they were in the middle of making dinner wasn't the ideal time to ask, but when _would_ be an appropriate time to request a ride to the alien spaceship hovering over the nearby metropolis?

"Did you parents say you could go?" her aunt asked slowly, resuming her peeling at a slower pace than before.

Alexis gave a theatrical sigh. "You know how my parents are. I haven't asked them yet. They'd probably say no if it was just me hopping on the train or something, but if _you_ took me…you know, seeing as you're a responsible adult and all…"

Rachel chuckled at that. "I'm not sure your mother shares your opinion there. Besides, we're all having dinner together tonight," she said, waving her arm vaguely at the cluttered kitchen, "and tomorrow we're going to Six Flags. Don't you want to go to Six Flags?"

_Good one_, Alexis thought sarcastically. "I've been there so many times I could probably navigate the place with my eyes closed. Besides, I've kind of outgrown the amusement park thing. I get that Jamie probably wants to go, but Uncle Todd can take her, right?" Jamie was Uncle Todd's daughter from a previous marriage. She was nine years old and acted every bit of it. She'd been bouncing up and down when they'd arrived, "so happy!" to see her older cousins. Alexis' amusement at her excitement had worn out about an hour after they got there, when Jamie had tried to strong-arm her, the way only children can do, into playing house with her. She had wanted Alexis to be the dog.

Rachel gave her a shrewd look, and Alexis knew her aunt was going to make her work for this trip. It was one of the things Alexis liked about her aunt – she treated Alexis more like another adult than like a kid who just got in the way. "Why do you want me to take you? Why shouldn't I go to the park with my step-daughter?"

"I'm not saying you _shouldn't_," Alexis replied smoothly, "but you've got to want to see this yourself, too. I mean, come on! It's an _alien spaceship_! You're all about adventure and seizing the day and all that. Think of it as a father-daughter, aunt-niece day, if that makes you feel better."

Rachel shook her head. "If you're too old for the park, then so is Corey. I'll ask your Uncle Todd, but only if you invite Corey, and your parents approve."

Alexis wrinkled her nose at the deal. It was pretty much a given that Uncle Todd would acquiesce, after a bit of wheedling, of course. And it was also pretty much a given that Corey would want to come, and if an invitation were actually extended to him, there would be no way to deny him. And then there were her parents…

Sensing her hesitancy, her aunt added, "You survived a six-hour car ride with him getting here. A trip into the city won't kill anyone."

Making a face, Alexis nodded her agreement. The arrangement wasn't ideal, but she'd make do. She _had_ to see that ship up close.

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><p>Alexis waited anxiously for dinner after that. She dutifully peeled potatoes, stirred pasta, and set the table as directed. Her aunt didn't trust her to do much more than that, and rightfully so. She had ruined too many meals in her own kitchen for her aunt to risk it here. She just didn't have the knack for cooking that her aunt did. As they were working, her grandparents shuffled in.<p>

"Hi, Gram; hi, Pap," Alexis said as they made their way into the kitchen.

"Oh, hi, Alex!" her grandmother smiled, walking over and pulling her into a hug. "How are you? How's school?"

"School's going well; we're almost done for the year," Alexis said mildly. She doubted her grandmother remembered which grade she was in.

"That's good. Are you keeping your grades up?" her Gram made conversation.

"Yep," Alexis gritted out, forcing a smile on her face. "Should even make honor roll this marking period."

"Wonderful, I'm so proud of you," her grandmother said, smiling genuinely at her, oblivious to her granddaughter's sarcasm.

As her grandmother turned and started towards the dining room, Alexis smiled and waved briefly at her grandfather, who was fiddling with one of his hearing aids. No reason to even attempt to suffer through a conversation there – and it seemed her grandfather wasn't going to push it, either. He wasn't senile like his wife, but he was deaf enough to make any conversation a hardship.

As soon as they were out of sight, her aunt smacked her lightly on the arm. "What was that for?" Alexis said, indignant.

"You know what that was for. It's not her fault she forgets things."

Alexis snorted. "Not washing your hair when you get a shower is forgetting something. Not remembering that your granddaughter hasn't gotten below an A her entire life is senility."

"Humility is _not_ your strong suit," her aunt muttered, turning back to wiping up the counter.

"Should it be?" she replied, plastering a cocky grin on her face.

Ignoring the question, her aunt pointed to a countertop. "Make yourself useful and take the bread out to the table."

"Yes, ma'am," she said, picking up the basket and walking out to the dining room. As she was setting it on the table, the door opened, revealing her Aunt Stacy and Uncle Peter and their two children, Jackie and Sara.

"Lexi!" Sara cried, running into her and giving her a big hug.

Laughing, Alexis hugged her back and ruffled her hair a bit. "Hey, twerp. How's it goin'?"

"I got a tattoo!" she said excitedly, pushing up her sleeve.

"A tattoo?" she said, eyebrows raised, looking up sharply at her Aunt Stacy.

"Henna," her aunt whispered.

"Ah."

"Look, Lexi! It's a butterfly!" Sara insisted, pushing her arm up so that Alexis could see it.

"That is really pretty, Sara," Alexis told her sincerely. It was cute and colorful, perfect for a kid's temporary tattoo. "Why don't you go show Aunt Rachel?" She pointed to the kitchen.

"OK!" Sara exclaimed, detaching from Alexis and bouncing into the kitchen.

Shaking her head at her cousin's endless enthusiasm, Alexis went about fixing some of the place settings, while her relatives put their things down and got comfortable. Walking back out to the kitchen, she grinned as she caught sight of Sara trying to use a footstool to climb up onto the counter. Her Aunt Rachel was doing something messy with the chicken, so her hands were occupied, and she gave Alexis a desperate look when she entered the room.

Alexis grabbed Sara around the waist, eliciting a squeal from the 6-year-old, and placed her back on the floor. "Whoa, there. Not on the counter, bud." Sara turned around and pouted at her in that adorable way only kids can, causing Alexis to laugh. "Nice try, but you're still not allowed to climb on the counters. Now go bug Jackie," she said, ushering her out of the kitchen.

Once she was safely on her way to finding her older sister, Alexis walked back towards Rachel who was still doing something mysterious to the chicken.

"Dinner should be ready in about twenty minutes, if you want to go let everyone know," Rachel said, not taking her eyes off of what she was doing.

"Sure."

She made her way to her aunt and uncle's bedroom, where everyone had put their coats and purses and such. Sighing, she began sifting through the mound of belongings.

"Whatcha looking for?"

Alexis looked up to see Corey standing in the doorway.

"My purse, I need to take a pill."

Walking over to a chair in the corner, Corey lifted her purse up over the chair and into view. It had been hanging behind the chair, out of view.

"I put it there so it wouldn't get tossed in the pile," he said, nodding to the bed and handing it to her.

"Thanks," she said, taking the purse and fishing her pill bottle out. Once in a while her brother surprised her by not being the typical older brother jerk, and it was nice. It was only sometimes, and usually when no one else was around, like now, but she took what she could get.

"So I guess we're eating soon then?" he asked as she popped a pill into her mouth.

She dry swallowed the pill quickly and nodded. "In like fifteen minutes. I've been tasked with telling everyone."

Corey nodded but didn't move.

"What?" she asked flatly. He was still standing there, so he wanted something.

"Heard you were going to Boston tomorrow to see the spaceship."

Alexis sighed. _News travels fast in this family._ Pursing her lips together, she decided to bite the bullet. "You wanna come?"

Corey smirked at her. "Like you could stop me."

Alexis just sighed and shook her head.

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><p>The conversation with her parents she'd promised her aunt didn't actually happen. She approached her dad sitting on the couch in the living room during a commercial break. Corey and her Uncle Peter were there, but the point was that her mother <em>wasn't<em>. She could be…uptight.

"Hey, Dad?"

Peeling his eyes away from the TV, he addressed her. "Hey, Alex, what's up?"

"Aunt Rachel's going to the city tomorrow and I want to go with her." Watching her father expectantly, she saw Corey roll his eyes at her stretching the story.

"Where in the city?" her father inquired suspiciously.

"Just…around," Alexis said hesitantly. She hadn't thought about that one. "Maybe to the mall?"

"Uh, huh," her dad deadpanned. "You want to go see that ship."

"I'm pleading the fifth."

He watched her for a few seconds. "You don't want to go to the park tomorrow?"

Alexis suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. "Not really; I've been there so many times already." Feigning innocence, she added, "Corey wants to go to the city, too."

She felt more than saw the dirty look Corey gave her. The fact of the matter was, saying her older brother was going would put her father at ease. For some reason her father still thought of her as a child who needed constant supervision. Sometimes it seemed like everyone thought that. Corey was just angry because he didn't like pushing his luck with their parents – he swore he saw a car for himself in the near future. Alexis thought this was a pipe dream, but hope sprang eternal.

"Alright," her father acquiesced reluctantly, "but no running off on your own. Stay with your aunt and do what she tells you, when she tells you."

Alexis grinned, trying to ignore the implication that she was an unruly child. "Got it."

Turning to Corey, her father said half-jokingly, "Keep her out of trouble, OK?"

"I'll try," Corey laughed.

"Do or do not," Alexis told her brother sagely. "There is no try."

"Thanks, Yoda," he said without looking away from the TV.

"So what's on?" she said, turning to the TV, wondering what was keeping her brother from bantering with her.

"The news – they're doing a story on the ships," Corey answered.

"Awesome," she said half to herself, plopping down beside him.

The screen was split between a woman in a studio and a reporter in the field. The reporter was standing on a busy sidewalk, large buildings and the alien spaceship high in the background. It was far enough away to see most of it, even through the buildings, but close enough that Alexis was jealous.

"As residents and those working in the city are well aware, the ship has not moved since earlier this afternoon, around 1 o'clock, when it stopped over Anacostia Park near the Frederick Douglass Bridge," the reporter said, the ribbon across the bottom of the screen confirming his location in Washington, D.C. "While the initial reaction to the ship was alarm and in some cases panic, that has for the most part subsided, and the prevailing sentiment among the public right now is that of cautious curiosity. However, the government is taking all possible precautions in this situation; the president and other high government officials have been taken to an undisclosed location for an unknown period of time."

"Now let's talk about the government's involvement here," the woman back in the studio cut in. "You said that Homeland Security has been in contact with someone aboard the ship behind you. Do we know the reason for the arrival of these ships? Do we know yet if they pose any kind of threat?"

There was a slight pause as the woman's words transmitted to the reporter, and Alexis thought the room itself must be holding its breath, it was so quiet.

"We are in the earliest stages of communication, so very little definitive information is available at this time. However, public officials have said that so far these 'extraterrestrials'" the reporter looked like he still couldn't believe he was using that word on air, "have showed no signs of hostility and, although the ship's presence may be alarming to those on the ground, they have been nothing but cooperative in our attempts to communicate."

"Well, that is good to hear, and thank you, Harold," the woman in the studio said, the divided picture giving way to her image across the full screen. "We will be coming back to our field report later this evening, but for now we have our daily stock market analysis. The Dow Jones…"

Alexis stopped listening at the words "stock market", tuning the woman out and turning to her dad. "See? Nothing to worry about. They're friendly aliens. Like E.T."

"You better hope so," Corey interjected, "because if it turns out they're more like Alien than E.T., I am so outta there, and if you're not fast enough your ass is getting left behind."

"Language," her father said, most of his attention still on the TV.

Taking advantage of her dad's distracted state, Alexis flipped Corey off and quickly got up, addressing all of them, "Well, that's about it for me." Turning to Corey, she said as sweetly as she could, "Let me know if you change your mind."

"Not in a million years," he replied.

"Suit yourself. But we _are_ going to the mall afterwards."

The look on her brother's face was priceless.

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><p>Edited to add solid line breaks where appropriate. Apparently the first upload failed to do this properly. *sigh*<p> 


	3. Chapter 3: The Calm

Alexis awoke the next morning to a storm of quick, insistent raps on the bedroom door. Feeling around for her phone, she looked blearily at the numbers. It was just past 8. Groaning, she closed her eyes and mumbled half-heartedly, "Go away. One more hour and I'll get up, I promise."

"But, Lexi, we're going to see the spaceship today!" came a high-pitched voice, muffled from behind the door.

Alexis propped herself up on one arm and looked at the door, trying to unscramble her brain. "Sara?"

Bursting through the door, her younger cousin ran up to her bed. "Why aren't you up yet? We're going to see the spaceship soon!" she repeated excitedly.

"Sara, you're not going with us." It was bad enough Corey was going; she really didn't want to have her kid cousin tagging along, too.

Sara pouted. "But Aunt Rachel said I could go!"

Alexis sighed and closed her eyes, deciding that changing the subject might be the best way to avoid hitting her head against a 6-year-old wall. "When did you get here?" Alexis and Corey had slept at their aunt and uncle's house to get an early start on the day, Alexis in the spare bedroom and Corey on the couch. He claimed it was just as good as a bed, but Alexis begged to differ. But Sara had gone home with her parents and sister after dinner last night.

"Daddy just drove me. Aunt Rachel says we're going to the mall today, too! I wanna ride on the carousel!"

"What carousel?"

"The one in the mall!"

"There's no carousel in the mall here! And we're not gonna play games or go anywhere fun today. You'd have a lot more fun at the park with the other kids," Alexis said, a little desperately.

"But I wanna hang out with _you_ today!"

Realizing she was not going to win this argument, Alexis sighed and got out of bed to start getting ready for a boring day of babysitting.

Alexis got antsier as the minutes ticked by before they left, and they ended up not getting on the road until almost 10 o'clock – mostly because her brother didn't wake up until well after 9, much to her annoyance. What if the spaceships suddenly shot back off into space, gone as quickly as they had appeared? What if the aliens decided that humanity wasn't interesting or advanced enough to bother with? She would never forgive him if she missed out on all this alien business because he wanted to sleep in.

She was glad when they left their aunt's house, but then the drive seemed to take forever. She thought she remembered it only taking 20 minutes before to get from their aunt's house in West Cambridge to the city, but today it took almost twice as long. The traffic was almost bumper-to-bumper, and Alexis wondered if it was all because of the ship or if some sports game or something was going on today. She thought she remembered there being a baseball team here in Boston.

As they were crossing the Longfellow Bridge into the city, Alexis got her first really good look at the thing up close. The pictures most definitely did _not_ do it justice. The estimates she'd heard were everywhere between a thousand feet long and half a mile long, and she could believe it now. She had trouble wrapping her mind around how something that big could even stay in the air. They passed underneath an edge of it to reach a parking garage and were left in darkness for a moment. The shadow they fell under seemed oppressive to Alexis, and no one in the car spoke as they watched the pedestrians outside, some gawking at the ship above them, some milling about as if nothing were happening.

As soon as they were parked in the garage, Alexis was out and snapping pictures on her phone, not wanting to miss a thing, the ominous feeling from under the shadow of the ship long forgotten.

"Seriously? Already?" Corey said when he saw her taking pictures. But he was grinning, too.

"Gotta memorialize this moment, bro – I wanna remember this forever," she replied as they started walking down a sidewalk cattycorner towards the ship. They had parked about 10 minutes away from the ship, so they had a short walk ahead of them to reach it on foot.

"Can I take pictures, too?" she heard Sara say.

"It's mine and I'm using it; ask Aunt Rachel if you can use hers," Alexis said distractedly, watching for good angles through the buildings. She could see the ship over the tops of the short and medium-sized ones, but there were plenty more really tall ones in the way.

"Alex," her aunt warned.

She turned from her angle-checking to a stern-faced aunt. Sighing, she reluctantly handed her phone over to her younger cousin. "You can only have it for a few minutes, and if you break it you're going to be in really big trouble. I need you to be really careful with it, okay?" Which wasn't what she wanted to say, but what she wanted to say wasn't really appropriate for a six-year-old.

Sara's eyes grew wide and she squeaked out, "Don't worry, Lexi! I'll be careful."

_Yeah, right_, Alexis thought. She knew what happened to everything the kid touched. She was careless and a _kid_.

They walked along the city sidewalks, with Alexis feeling strangely naked without her phone, taking in the ship and just generally seeing the sights. Alexis indulged in a little people-watching, too – the closer they got to the ship, the more people she saw watching it and taking pictures and video. She grinned as she heard one teenage boy say to his friends as they walked by, "Man, I can't believe those kids are down here. If my parents found out I was here, I'd be in deep shit."

When they reached the edge of the ship, Aunt Rachel said, "All right, I think this is close enough."

Alexis opened her mouth to protest, but closed it again when she saw the look on her aunt's face. "Phone, twerp," she said to Sara, holding her hand out expectantly. As soon as she felt her phone in her hand, she aimed it straight up and took as wide a picture as she could. She couldn't get much in the shot; it felt like the ship was bearing down on top of them. For a moment, looking straight up at it, she thought it might suddenly careen out of control and come crashing down on them all. Shivering a little, she zoomed in for a slew of close-ups. She saw the same patterns and design she'd seen on all the other ships online, and she wondered again what it all meant. Which end was the front? Where were the engines? Were there windows anywhere for the aliens to look out? Were they watching them right now?

That thought made her pause. What _did_ these aliens think of them? As far as she'd heard, the government had gotten as far as "We come in peace," but if they had communicated beyond that, they weren't telling people. So why were the aliens here? And what did they look like?

Feeling an insistent tug on one the right side of her shirt, Alexis looked down and saw Sara pointing behind her, a hand over her mouth attempting to hold back a giggle. Turning around, Alexis grinned and brought her phone up, quickly snapping a picture. Looking at the newly captured image, she said smugly, "Oh, yeah. That one's going on Facebook right now!"

"Huh?" Corey said, snapping out of his daze.

Alexis turned her phone around and held it out so he could see the picture. It was of him, slack-jawed, neck craned up towards the ship, a slightly dumbfounded expression on his face.

"Aw, come on," he said, reaching out to grab the phone from her.

But she was expecting it and pulled her arm back just in time, turning slightly away from him as she began typing rapid-fire on her phone. "You know what I love about modern technology?" Without really waiting for an answer, she continued, "It can memorialize anything forever."

Turning her phone back around so he could see, she displayed the same photo, this time set against the familiar blue and white background of Facebook.

Corey just looked annoyed. "Why do you have to be such a pest?"

"It's my duty as your sister," she replied, smiling sweetly.

"All right, you two," her aunt said, giving them both a look. "I think you've gotten all the pictures you're going to get, Alex. Let's head back to the car and then we can go to the mall."

"Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod!"

Corey stared at Alexis like she'd grown a third head. "What is your mal_func_tion?"

Grinning back at him and pointing to a sign up ahead, she turned to their aunt, her eyes sparkling. "We have to go, oh my gosh, can we go? Please?"

They were at the mall in Back Bay, and Alexis had just started to wonder if there was anything here besides food and expensive clothes when they turned the corner around P.F. Chang's and she caught sight of a sign for the Skywalk Observatory. They had been walking in the direction of the ticket kiosk and Alexis hadn't noticed until they were practically on top of it.

"And here I thought I only had one six-year-old with me today," her aunt said mildly.

"What? What is it?" Sara asked insistently, looking up ahead to where her cousin was pointing, Alexis' excitement effortlessly infecting her.

"It's the observatory; I forget it was even here," Alexis said in a rush. "Can we go up? Please, Aunt Rach?"

"Why do you think we came to The Shops?" her aunt answered coolly, nodding towards the kiosk. "That's probably the best view you're going to get of that ship in the whole city."

Alexis grinned. "You are so awesome. Just so you know." She heard Corey snort and figured he was rolling his eyes, but she didn't bother to look.

"Why, thank you. I'll go get the tickets; you guys wait here, all right?"

"Sure," Corey replied for them, pulling out his phone as their aunt went to get in line.

Sara watched Corey silently for a few moments, then turned to Alexis. "Can I play on your phone?"

"Seriously? Again?" Alexis deadpanned.

"Just let her have it," Corey said without looking up. "It'll keep her out of trouble."

Sara pouted. "Pretty please, Lexi? Just for a little bit…"

"Fine," Alexis said, shaking her head and sighing as she fished her phone out of her pocket. She saw a new text from Bethany, but decided to look at it in a few minutes when she could actually reply. "But you better give it back when we get up there, got it?"

"Got it!" Sara replied, already happily pecking away at the phone.

Alexis looked over at the kiosk to see how much longer their aunt would be, but she was already walking back towards them. As soon as she was close enough, Alexis asked impatiently, "So? Can we go up now?"

Rachel looked apologetic. "They're sold out. They don't have any tickets left for the rest of the day. It seems a 50-story building with a panoramic view of the city is in high demand when there's a spaceship in the area," she finished dryly.

"So we're not going up to the observatory." It was more of a statement than a question, and her disappointment was evident in her voice.

"I'm sorry, honey. But you know, we can always come back tomorrow."

"Yeah, but who knows if the ship'll still be here tomorrow?" Alexis asked, frustrated.

"Chill out," Corey said, not bothering to look up from his phone. "You got pictures earlier. It's not the end of the world."

As soon as he said 'world', a bright flash of white light illuminated everything around them. It only lasted a second, and then it was gone as quickly as it had come, leaving Alexis blinking to clear her suddenly spotted vision.

"What the hell was _that_?" Corey said, looking up from his phone in confusion.

"I dunno, but it felt like someone just took a picture, with the flash on, right in my face," Alexis said unhappily.

Her aunt frowned. "That wasn't a camera flash, it came from outside. But it couldn't have been lightning…" she trailed off, scanning the clear sky through the glass doors behind the ticket kiosk.

"Lexi, your phone's not working," Sara said glumly.

"Aw, crap," Alexis mumbled, mostly to herself. Snatching the phone back from her cousin, she scolded, "What did you do?" The screen was black as if it were turned off, so she tried turning it on, but nothing happened. She sighed theatrically as she started pushing other buttons, trying to get any activity on the thing.

"I didn't do it, I promise! I was playing a game and then the big flash came and it stopped working!"

Alexis' brow furrowed as the screen remained dark despite her efforts and she realized something really was wrong with the phone. "It won't turn on," she said, quickly becoming frustrated.

"Mine's not working either," Corey added, sounding puzzled.

Sara frowned, looking at the ceiling, and tugged on her aunt's arm. "Aunt Rachel, why are all the lights off?"

"I don't know, honey. I'm sure they'll be back on soon," was her aunt's reply, maternal instinct telling her to reassure the child no doubt kicking in.

"It's not just the lights. I don't think anything electronic's working."

Alexis looked up at her brother's words and, sure enough, other people were doing the same thing they were – checking their phones, their tablets, everything, and Alexis saw various degrees of confusion and frustration on their faces. All the mall lights were out, though there was still plenty of daylight to see by, which is why she hadn't noticed that. And now that she was listening for it, she didn't hear the usual high-pitched hum of machinery. Anywhere. She shivered; it was an eerie silence – filled with the voices of the people around them, but without the nearly ever-present background noise provided by modern technology.

"Hmmm. A transformer probably blew somewhere close by – that was the bright flash," Rachel said after looking around a bit herself. "Well, since the power's out and we can't go to the observatory today, what do you guys want to do? Do you wanna stick around for a bit? The restaurants will be closing until the power comes back on, but some of the stores might stay open."

Alexis shared a look with Corey. They were both a little freaked by the sudden failure of all the technology. "Nah, I'm not really in the mood to shop anymore," Alexis said. "Let's just head back to your house, I guess."

"Agreed," Corey said, though he sounded distracted. Alexis gave him an inquiring look, but he just shook his head as they headed back the way they had come.

A/N: So sorry for the large gap between chapters here! Life has been complete insanity with my new job, so I promise I haven't given up on this story, but I definitely won't be getting to update very often. :-( I appreciate anyone who actually keeps reading as I crawl along at a snail's pace.

This chapter's title comes from the well-known phrase "the calm before the storm". Also, the Skywalk Observatory is a real attraction at The Shops at Prudential Center in the Back Bay area.

And last but certainly not least: Many, many thanks to those who reviewed last chapter! You guys' words of encouragement have been great motivation for me to keep writing. Once again, if you can spare a moment, please let me know what you think of this chapter (or the ones before), what you liked/didn't like, and anything else that comes to mind. Thanks for reading!


	4. Chapter 4: The Storm

Walking back through the shopping center, Alexis watched as more and more stores closed, their doors locking to keep out the meandering customers until the power came back on. The crowds were starting to thin as they neared the exit as the patrons realized the shops would not be opening up again soon and left.

They were maybe 50 feet away from the doors when Alexis began to hear a steady thumping sound, so faint at first that she thought she might be imagining it. But it grew louder as they approached the doors, until she realized it was coming from outside – and it sounded like it was on the move.

Alexis half-turned to her family and opened her mouth, about to ask if anyone else was hearing it, but stopped mid-motion when a middle-aged man in a suit carrying a briefcase came barreling through the doors, a look of terror on his face. He tore through the crowd in front of the doors and she had a second to wonder why he was running – it looked like he was running _from_ something – before his briefcase sideswiped her in his haste to get past the crowd.

"Hey!" she yelled after him as he kept on running. "Jerk," she muttered to herself, rubbing her arm where the briefcase had made contact.

"Are you all right?" Rachel asked, worried eyes darting from her niece to the fleeing man and back to her niece again. He hadn't stopped or even slowed down, either unaware or unconcerned that he'd just hit her.

Alexis didn't have a chance to reply as a single tone pierced the air around them; it lasted several seconds and sounded almost musical, but at the same time it unsettled her on a visceral level. It came from outside and reminded Alexis of a horn, but it was too loud for that and she didn't recognize it as any instrument she knew. At the sound, the conversations around them died and more people moved towards the doors, trying figure out where the sound had come from. The crowd started really packing in as more and more people crammed around the doors, and Alexis was just beginning to feel claustrophobic when the people ahead of them started screaming and the tide of people was suddenly pushing back towards them into the mall.

"Aunt Rachel?" The fear in Sara's high-pitched voice was all too plain and Alexis turned away from trying to see outside past the crowd to see Sara clinging to their aunt's arm, her little eyes wide. "Why is everybody shouting? What's that noise?"

"What the hell?" she heard Corey mutter as their aunt raised her voice to be heard over the ever-increasingly noise of the crowd, "OK, kids? Let's just stay inside for now. I'm not sure–"

Alexis caught a glimpse of what she could only describe as a giant metal foot landing on the street outside, accompanied by the loudest thump yet – and then the whole world was exploding in front of them. She heard herself join in with the screaming around her, which rose to a fever pitch, and instinctively pulled her hands up over her face and head. She felt debris hit her and the other people in the crowd jostling her as she and the rest of the crowd half fell and half ducked to get out of the way of what had to have been an explosion.

After a second or two, she uncovered her head and turned back to the doors – or at least what used to be the doors. Where the entire wall had been just a few seconds ago was now a gaping, smoking hole. Far worse than that, though, was the creature standing in the middle of it all – two or three times as tall as a person, easily, and made entirely of metal. She barely had time to register the arm that looked like a huge gun before it opened fire, shooting some kind of laser into the crowd. She watched in paralyzing horror as the people it targeted began dropping like flies, one after another.

"Alex! ALEX!"

She heard her name being called, but it felt distant and unimportant compared to the metal giant killing people right in front of her. She watched it as if in slow motion: the machine set its sights on someone in the crowd, trained its blue lasers on the person, and then, at the very last second, the lasers turned orange. It fired a single shot and its target went down – dead or stunned, she couldn't tell which.

Suddenly a hand grabbed hers and started pulling her through the crowd. "Come on!" she heard Corey say, his voice right beside her now. Mentally shaking herself, she struggled to keep up with her brother and not get separated; everyone was trying to get away from the giant machine firing continuously into the crowd, but they were all moving in different directions and she had to put all of her effort into just maintaining the connection between his hand and hers.

As they got farther away from the mall entrance, Alexis realized there weren't as many people running alongside them and the sound of the robot wasn't keeping pace with them. "Wait!" she said, tugging on Corey's arm and stopping abruptly. She turned back to the massacre taking place behind them, which she instantly regretted, the urge to run almost too strong to resist washing over her as soon as she caught sight of the horrific scene. She tried to identify faces, but they were just too far away. Turning back to Corey, she asked, almost afraid of the answer, "Where's Sara and Aunt Rachel?"

"They're ahead of us, now come on!" he said, tugging her along again as she breathed a sigh of relief that only lasted a second. "We can't stay here; it's coming this way!"

She stole one last fearful glance back and saw that he was right; the thing was closer than it had been just a few seconds before. It wasn't after them in particular; it was just making its way down the corridor, shooting people as it came upon them, cold and methodical and fucking _terrifying_.

Turning back around, she finally found her feet and began running in earnest, feeling a little stupid that her brother had been practically dragging her along up to now. Only a handful of people were still running, down from the crowd of over 50 at the doors a few moments ago. It terrified her to think that most of them might be dead.

After a minute or so they rounded a corner and entered a food court. She mentally shivered as they passed people who stood there and just watched the group pass, various expressions of surprise, curiosity, and even amusement on their faces. Alexis caught a glimpse of one man paused comically in the middle of taking a bite of pizza, slice half in, half out of his mouth.

"Run, you idiots!" she screamed at them as they ran past, not caring how crazy she looked or sounded and knowing she had to seem a bit of both. "It's coming!"

At that very moment the thing rounded the corner and let out another blast of that horn-like tone. She cringed as the people dining joined in the screaming and the running, and she hoped beyond hope that it didn't catch them.

"In here!" Corey yelled, yanking her abruptly to the left through the open archway of some eatery. It got darker and darker with each footfall as they passed a salad bar, then a darkened refrigerator – and then they burst through a pair of metal doors into what might have been the kitchen, but the small amount of light that came through the doors behind them as they entered abruptly disappeared as the doors swung shut behind them, leaving them in near-pitch-black darkness.

"Stop!" Alexis yelled as his hand pulled her to the right. "I can't see where we're going!" She just knew she was going to collide face-first into a wall, the way he was booking blindly through the unlit area.

"Shut up!" Corey hissed back as he squatted, dragging her down beside him.

"What the hell are you doing?" she whispered to him, trying to find his face in the dark to glare at it. "We need to find Aunt Rachel and Sara! They could still be out there with that thing!"

She made a move to get up, but Corey pushed a hand down on her shoulder, forcing her to stay low, just as she heard the door swing open. As light spilled into the room, she saw that they were crouched down between two metal tables, the kind you saw in restaurant kitchens on TV, reinforcing Alexis' assumption about where they were. She opened her mouth, about to call out to whoever had just entered the room, but Corey swiftly placed a hand over her mouth, wrapping his other hand around her head to keep the first hand in place. She had almost decided which part of his body she was going to hit when she heard a timid female voice say, "Hello?"

She opened her eyes wide and pointed them in the direction of the voice, trying to tell Corey that they should say something and not just sit there ignoring her. It wasn't Rachel or Sara, but she didn't care; she'd take help from anyone right now.

He shook his head vigorously at her and she thought he might have mouthed 'no', but the light was fading as the door closed behind the woman, and then it was dark once again.

"Hello?" the voice came again, this time closer to them, and it was all Alexis could do not to jump up and talk to the person. She was frustrated and frightened and just wanted to figure out what the hell was going on, and maybe this person could help. "I saw some people come in here…are you okay?" The wavering voice paused as it came closer to them, and Alexis wondered again why the hell they were hiding from someone who clearly wanted to help them. "Are you hurt?"

Suddenly she heard the door fly open and hit the wall; at the same time there came this terrible animalistic sound, but like no animal she had ever heard before. She heard the woman scream and yell, "Oh, my God!" and there was more screaming, a couple of bangs, and more of that unidentifiable animal noise all jumbled up together. She listened, paralyzed in fear, until she felt the hand on the back of her head being removed and pressing into her shoulder, carefully but firmly guiding her underneath the closest table. She felt her brother following closely behind her as he removed his hand from her mouth but kept herding her forward until they were under a portion of the tables with some sort of cloth or napkin draped over the sides.

The room fell silent and Alexis froze mid-crawl. She could still hear the distant sound of screaming coming from the food court – or maybe it was beyond the food court – and she could hear the blood rushing in her own ears, but she tried not to make a sound and listened for any clue about what was happening outside the safety net of the cloth-covered prep table. She heard a rhythmic tapping moving slowly around the room and looked back sharply at the vague shadow of her brother. It wasn't exactly footsteps, but she got the impression that there was some_thing_ walking around the room.

Alexis held her breath as the sounds drew closer until they were right next to the table. Her eyes tracked the sound of the movement beyond the cloth, even though she couldn't see it, and she prayed with every fiber of her being that whatever it was didn't look under the table, that it didn't find them…

…and then it was passing the table, meandering its way to the door. She heard the door open, saw faint light spill onto the floor around the edge of the cloth at her feet, and then the room darkened for the third time in as many minutes as she heard the door fall shut once again.

She let out the breath she'd been holding and sucked in another deep one. Then another. She looked at her brother; her eyes had adjusted enough to the darkness now that she could just make out the look of stunned horror on his face. She was certain there was a similar expression on her own face. After a silent moment Alexis said the only thing that she could think of.

"We are in such deep shit."

* * *

><p>AN: So, this ended up being sort of a continuation of chapter 3, since I had to cut that one off rather abruptly so that it didn't get too long. Unsurprisingly the title comes from the same place chapter 3's did.

I hope you all enjoyed reading this chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it! We're finally getting to the good stuff, and I hope you stick around to see where it goes from here. As always, please drop me a line if you have a moment to let me know what you think of the chapter or the story as a whole. Thanks for reading!


	5. Chapter 5: Those Who Favor Fire

After several moments of baited breath and fearing the worst, Alexis couldn't stand it anymore. She made a move to pull up the cloth covering the table they were under, but a hand abruptly clasped onto her wrist, stilling her. "What the hell?" she hissed indignantly to the dark shape beside her.

"I'll go out, make sure it's safe. You stay here 'til I say it's OK to come out," Corey ordered, lifting the cloth and climbing out before she could answer.

"Jerk," she muttered to herself as the cloth fell back down after him and obstructed her view, annoyed at being treated like a child – as usual. She tried to ignore the worry that began building in her stomach as soon as he was out of her sight, distracting herself by thinking over everything that had happened in the last…what, half hour or so?

God, had it really only been that long? Even though her phone couldn't tell her the time, she knew it hadn't been very long since the electromagnetic wave, or whatever the hell it was, had knocked out all the electronics.

She shivered as she thought back to that moment. There had been confusion, sure, but no real panic. Not until the giant robot thing had shown up. And now, apparently, there was something else out there, something smaller because it had gotten through the double doors to the kitchen where they were hiding, and those giant robots certainly wouldn't have fit. Not without breaking the wall, anyway.

Alexis let out a small surprised noise when the sheet in front of her rippled, relaxing when it revealed Corey, a shadow just barely recognizable as distinct from the other shadows.

"Come on, coast is clear," he said softly.

"Then why are you whispering?" she accused in the same hushed tone.

"I'd rather be safe than sorry; what about you?" he said, his tone clipped in annoyance.

As much as she'd wanted to go out before, she'd been secretly relieved when he'd told her to stay behind. And now that he was saying it was safe to come out…she felt torn, like some part of her wanted to stay after all. Which was absolutely ridiculous.

"Whatever," she muttered, hoping to mask her trepidation, climbing confidently out from beneath the table that had hidden them from the horrors that now roamed the mall. A hand fell on her shoulder as she stood, gently guiding her from behind towards a door she couldn't see, although as they got closer she saw the faintest traces of light from underneath it.

Reaching the door, she shrugged the hand off her shoulder, hearing a puff of annoyance behind her as a result, and opened the door, a crack of light piercing the darkness and almost blinding her before her eyes adjusted. She didn't see or hear anyone in the immediate vicinity, so she opened the door the whole way.

The sight that greeted her was unlike anything she'd ever seen before – at least not in real life. It looked like something from a disaster movie. The eatery they'd took shelter in was relatively intact, but in the central part of the food court, chairs and tables were overturned, in some cases contorted or deformed, as if some angry giant had come along and smashed them beneath his feet. Alexis decided that may not be too far from the truth. Shopping bags and the items that had been inside them were strewn across the floor in some places, kicked into disarray without a thought in the customers' haste to leave. There was a conspicuous lack of actual people, though, and she was mostly grateful, but at the same time she realized that some part of her had been wishing her aunt and cousin were just on the other side of the door, waiting for them, and her heart sank even as she realized just how absurd that was. Like they knew where she and her brother had gone. She pushed the irrational disappointment from her mind as she turned around to face Corey. "There's no one out here. Let's go and find–"

Alexis stopped short as her eyes spied a woman on the floor behind Corey, lying in an unnatural position, a small pool of blood forming underneath her right side. _It must be the woman who came in to check on us,_ she thought, horrified.

"Oh, my god, is she dead?" Alexis said shrilly, staring down at the woman with wide eyes.

"Don't look at her," Corey hissed angrily, turning an unresisting Alexis around to face the well-lit, but decimated, food court once again. "Just keep walking."

He pushed her the rest of the way through the doorway and went through himself before she recovered enough to say anything. "We have to help her," she said without looking behind her for fear of what she would see. Her voice was shaking, but at least it had returned to its normal octave.

"It's too late to help her." Corey's voice was soft behind her, and she wasn't sure if he was trying to be gentle or he was just trying not to be heard. "We'll…we'll tell someone she's here. But right now we need to get out of here and find Aunt Rachel and Sara."

And, man, that was _definitely_ something Alexis could agree with. Swallowing past the lump in her throat, she nodded, and they left.

* * *

><p>As they back-tracked, they passed even greater destruction than what was in the food court. It was obvious in some areas that the giant robot had passed through, as it left gaping holes in the architecture where it was too small to fit through, objects scattered across the ground. Some had been smashed so badly they were nearly unrecognizable lumps of metal, cloth, and plastic.<p>

It was silent, too, like when all the birds and animals were scared off into hiding during a big storm and they didn't come out again right away. It was an even worse silence than after everything electric had shut off, because there weren't any voices to fill it.

The worst, though, was when they started coming across the bodies. There were fewer than Alexis had feared but more than she wanted to think about. When they saw the first one – second, technically, if you counted the woman in the food court eatery – Alexis forced herself to look, even as she wanted to turn away. She memorized every detail of the person's appearance so she could describe them later if needed. She did this with the next person, and the next person, and the next person, until they came across a group of six people, lying on top of one another. Several of them had the same auburn-red hair and, one of them was a girl, maybe 6 or 7–

Alexis looked away as she choked out a sob and stopped walking. No, no, no, this could not be happening…

"Alex?" Corey said softly, and this time she knew he was trying to be gentle.

Making a quick swipe at the tears threatening to run down her cheeks, she looked at him where he had stopped beside her, a mixture of sadness and concern in his eyes. "That girl," she said. She knew he would know who she meant, but she afforded a brief glance at the family anyway and shivered. "That could be Sara," she said, her voice breaking as she said her cousin's name, fresh tears springing to her eyes.

"Sara's just fine, you hear me?" Corey said firmly, catching her eye and holding her gaze. If there was a tiny note of hysteria in his voice, she wasn't going to call him on it. "She's just fine because Aunt Rachel's with her, and remember what we always say about Aunt Rachel?"

"She's the one to go to if the world ever ends," Alexis recited their childhood conviction. Taking a deep breath, she continued, gritting her teeth, "But where _are_ they?"

"We just have to keep looking," Corey answered, but she could tell that he was getting frustrated, too. "I swear I saw them run into one of the stores in this section…"

Suddenly there was a cry from ahead of them. "Corey! Alex!"

Alexis looked up sharply, and there she was, just a few dozen feet away – their aunt, with a little girl in tow.

"Aunt Rachel! _Sara_!"

Running towards them, she closed the distance as quickly as she could, not stopping until she hit the warm solid body of her aunt, throwing her arms around her, realizing even as she was doing it that she was throwing her aunt off balance and her aunt was trying very hard not to fall, but somehow she just didn't care.

"I'm so glad you're safe," her aunt whispered into her hair as they reunited. "Don't you ever scare me like that again, you hear me?"

Alexis gave a wry chuckle and grinned up at her aunt as she pulled out of the embrace. "You, too." She grinned down at Sara, who grinned right back up at her, and she knelt down, pulling the youngster into a fierce hug. She didn't have words for how grateful she was to see them.

She looked up just in time to see her brother and aunt separating from a hug. Standing up, she took Sara's hand and turned to her aunt. "Can we go home now?" Her voice betrayed her weariness and the question was rhetorical, but their aunt replied anyway.

"Yeah, I think it is _way_ past time to go home. Let get outta here."

* * *

><p>Alexis' high from reuniting with the other members of her family faded as they exited the mall and entered the streets. There was considerably less damage outside, and so far no bodies, for which she was extremely grateful. Sara was with them now, and the kid seemed to be handling everything OK, considering, but she was really glad Sara hadn't seen what they'd seen back at the mall. No one deserved the kind of nightmares Alexis was sure she was going to have now.<p>

But even though the destruction was at a minimum, it was still obvious something big had happened. All the cars they saw were stopped, most of them in the middle of the road, as if the people driving them had just decided to get out and walk instead. Alexis wondered if the flash of light that had turned off all the electronics in the mall had done this as well. There were no lights on anywhere, either, or other signs of electricity. She wondered what the range on it was and hoped it hadn't reached as far as the parking garage where their aunt's car was parked.

The farther away from the mall they went, the more it stayed the same, and it gnawed at Alexis. "What the hell is going on here?" she asked, frustrated, as they walked through the eerie silence. "Heck, what the heck is going on here," she amended hastily at the looks of disapproval and wide-eyed shock that she got from her aunt and cousin, respectively.

"Seriously? You haven't figured it out yet?" Corey said. His voice had a dull tone to it, as if he were bored. Alexis felt the sudden urge to slap him, but she restrained herself.

"Let's not speculate too much," Aunt Rachel said, catching Corey's eye and glancing down pointedly at Sara, who had one hand in Alexis' and the other in her aunt's.

Corey muttered something incoherent, and their aunt was good enough to take the high road. Alexis, on the other hand, didn't have that kind of restraint. It had been a stressful afternoon, and her patience had run out. She made a noise of disgust. "If you're going to say something, say it loud enough for everyone to hear. Otherwise just shut up."

"It's the aliens, genius," he snapped. "They attacked us. They attacked the mall and apparently the rest of the city and who knows where else. We are under attack by freaking aliens." He laughed bitterly.

"That's enough," Aunt Rachel said firmly, an edge to her voice that Alexis had never heard before. "We are not discussing this right now. We are going back to the car, back to the house, and that's all anybody needs to be concerned with right now."

Alexis swallowed and watched the road ahead of them, unable to look anyone in the eye, least of all her aunt. She'd never heard her aunt talk that way before, not even when Jamie, her step-daughter, had gotten into her desk drawer a few years back and used every pen, pencil, crayon, and bottle of white-out in it to "decorate" the walls while Aunt Rachel and Uncle Todd were out. And after that incident the babysitter had been fired the next day.

They walked in silence for several minutes, making their way down the streets of what looked like a ghost town. It was eerie, because it was broad daylight and they were in the heart of one of the major cities on the eastern seaboard, but there wasn't a soul in sight. Alexis shivered and tried not to think about it, without success.

As they rounded yet another corner, Alexis thought she heard a low rumble from somewhere up ahead of them. She turned to Corey, his face mirroring her own, a mixture of cautious curiosity and uneasiness. "What–"

Just then a monstrous pick-up came thundering around the corner a few blocks up and started in their direction. It was speeding, weaving haphazardly in and out of the cars stopped on the street, and as it got closer Alexis caught sight of the guy driving it. She thought he looked frightened and harried, like he was trying to get away from something. She'd seen that look before – on the faces of the people at the mall entrance just before the robot had burst through the wall.

"Everybody inside!" she yelled, darting through the closest door without thinking, pulling Sara roughly in after her, hoping the others would follow.

Either they realized the same thing Alexis had or they were following her lead, but whichever it was, everyone was inside in a matter of seconds. Alexis flattened herself against the wall as best she could, rearranging herself so that she could see outside while Sara was somewhere behind her. Corey and her aunt ended up along the opposite wall and looked like they were doing the same thing – trying to stay out of sight while still in a position to see out.

A second later, the truck blazed past them, engine cutting through the air and seeming abnormally loud in the otherwise silent street. It would have left an even greater silence in its wake, but another sound made itself known as the rumble of the engine passed them: the deep rhythmic thumping of the robot machine.

Alexis shivered but kept her eyes trained on the street. The truck passed, and then the robot was passing them, too. She was about to breathe a sigh of relief, until she saw a new horror following closely behind it – a creature unlike anything she had ever seen, except for maybe in a sci-fi movie. It was a dark, disgusting color, with just enough humanoid likeness in the body to unsettle her, but even if the body was in some small way humanoid, the rest of it screamed alien: three-pronged hands and feet; slick, oily-looking skin; six long, dexterous legs; two…she didn't even know _what_ to call them, hanging down from the sides of what could be its jaw. And that was only the physical features.

Almost before she noticed those things, she noticed how it moved, quickly and efficiently skittering along on far too many legs, keeping up with the robot easily. She forgot everything else as she watched, the robot catching up to the truck half a block down the road, the ugly alien creatures – there were two of them – right behind. Bringing down a perfectly timed footfall on the bed of the truck, the robot crushed its rear half, causing the truck to come to an abrupt stop. Half a second later one of the alien creatures scurried up to the driver's side door, made an awful screeching noise–

–and then Alexis was glad she didn't have a good angle to see that side of the truck. She was hearing enough to get the gist of it. Swallowing heavily and looking away briefly, her hands found Sara behind her and she pulled her into a tight embrace, covering Sara's ears. This was absolute insanity, and she had to spare her cousin from as much of this horror show as she could.

Sickeningly soon, the destructive threesome was continuing on down the street without a backward glance in their direction. _Now_ Alexis breathed a sigh of relief, releasing Sara slowly. They all just stood there for a moment, looking at each other and trying to absorb what had just happened.

"We have to move fast," Corey said, breaking the silence. "They have surprise and technology on their side, so we've got to be quicker than they are."

"And smarter," Aunt Rachel amended. "Coming in here when you saw the truck coming?" she said, looking at Alexis. "That was good thinking. We all need to be on our toes until we have a better handle on all of this."

Alexis normally would have felt pride at the compliment, but right now she mostly just felt tired. Weary. She looked out the window and saw the mangled truck, but no humans, aliens, or robots were in sight. "Coast looks clear, at least from this direction."

"Clear here, too," Corey agreed, eyes sweeping the other direction on the street.

"Well, then, let's get going," Aunt Rachel said.

And so they did.

* * *

><p>AN: Hope you're enjoying the story! As always, please take a moment to leave a review if you can – what you thought, what you liked, suggestions, what you'd like to see happen, etc. Helpful feedback really makes my day!

This chapter's title comes from Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice". As with most Robert Frost, it is succinct yet profound and most definitely worth a read.


	6. Chapter 6: The Transient Creatures

Lost in thought, Alexis ended up falling a few feet behind the rest of her family. When she finally noticed, she realized she needed the space anyway to think and decided she didn't mind lagging a little behind.

Pulling her phone out of her jeans pocket for the first time in at least an hour, she clicked the power button once. Nothing. She tried holding it down for several seconds. Still nothing. Pressing in both of the phone's buttons, she held them and counted to 30. Looking at the still-blank screen, she released the buttons, roughly shoved the phone back into her pocket, and counted to 30 again, this time trying to match her breathing with the count. When she thought she was sufficiently calm again, she called up to one of the figures ahead of her. "Hey, Corey."

He turned to look at her and she jerked her head back to indicate she wanted to talk to him. He whispered something to Aunt Rachel, who nodded, and then he hung back and met her behind the other two. As soon as they were side by side, Alexis slowed her pace, adding to the distance between the two of them and her aunt and cousin. When she decided they wouldn't be overheard, she spoke.

"So did you mean what you said back there? In the mall?"

"Yeah, you're gonna need to give me a little more than that to go on." He sounded annoyed by her ambiguity, but at least he was listening. "What was it that I said?"

"You know, about the world ending and sticking with Aunt Rachel because she's so tough." She paused and looked at him somberly. "You don't think it is, do you? The end of the world?"

To her complete surprise, he laughed, and it wasn't a cheerful laugh – it was angry, cynical. "What does it look like to you?" he said, waving a hand around at the deserted street.

Alexis looked around at the scene she'd been trying to ignore. Cars were stopped in the middle of a deserted street that should have been teeming with life – and smaller things, like the purse laying on the opposite sidewalk, or the half-eaten meal sitting on the table in that little corner diner. Little evidences that, until quite recently and quite suddenly, life had been thriving here.

"No," Alexis said firmly, surprising herself with her sudden conviction. "The world's still here. It doesn't end 'til the fat lady sings, the trumpet sounds, and everyone is dead. It's not over yet," she finished stubbornly.

"Yeah, you keep telling yourself that."

Anger welled up inside her at his disregard. "Seriously, why do you always have to be such a pessimist?"

"Why do always have to ignore what's right in front of you? Pull your nose out of a book once in a while and smell the roses. This is it, Alex. What did you expect? A big fanfare, maybe the chance to be the hero of your very own fantasy story?" Corey snorted and shook his head. "This is real life. Get used to it."

"God, you're such a jerk sometimes," she said angrily, very deliberately keeping her hands in her pockets to keep from accidentally hitting him. She hurried to catch up with the other two.

"Hey, Alex," her aunt greeted Alexis as she pulled up alongside them. "How're you doing?"

The note of concern in her voice was impossible to miss, and sometimes Alexis really hated how easy to read she was. She could never hide when she was upset about something, especially from her aunt. Nevertheless she would _not_ turn into some touchy-feely pushover. She had to keep her game face on if she wanted anyone to take her seriously. "Peachy," she said darkly, unable to really hide her mood and half hoping for an excuse to lash out.

Fortunately her aunt knew better than to push her. "Well, we're almost at the garage, only a few more blocks to go…I don't know about you, but I am going to be glad just to get off my feet. It has been a crazy day." She gave a little chuckle, clearly trying to lighten the mood.

Alexis kept her eyes on the depressing scenery and her mouth shut. It was better for everyone if she just didn't comment and took some time to cool down and _adjust_. There were just too many things to think about. With all the technology not working, she couldn't be sure that any of the other ships had attacked the cities they'd been hovering over – although it seemed likely. Nor did she know how far the aliens had branched out from the ship over Boston. Had they only attacked the city proper or had they gone into the suburbs?

She looked at her aunt and opened her mouth to ask if she thought her parents were okay, but stopped short when she caught sight of Sara, hand clenched tightly in her aunt's, a look of frightened shock on her young face.

Suddenly Alexis felt like kicking herself. She wasn't always the best at empathy and all that, and today had been one crisis after another…but still, it was kind of selfish that all she was thinking about was herself. Sure, she was dying to know how her parents were doing in all of this, but her kid cousin, who didn't have the mental capacity Alexis did to keep her worry in check, was probably worried sick about her parents _and_ herself.

Alexis turned forward again, feeling like she should say something but not knowing what. Suddenly she caught movement in the corner of her eye. Instinctively her eyes locked onto it – two guys walking down the opposite sidewalk. They looked to be somewhere in their 20s, maybe college age or just past, and Alexis noted their good looks indifferently. Any other time, Alexis would have taken the time to appreciate the view, but for whatever reason she just wasn't feeling it. _Maybe because the world just ended and reality is still rearranging itself, _she thought wryly, even as she mentally cringed at her own apocalyptic assessment of today's events.

"Hey," she whispered, nudging her aunt.

Aunt Rachel looked up. She seemed to hesitate for a second, and then she called out to them, "Hey there. Are you two all right?"

On the surface her tone was agreeable – cheerful even, considering the circumstances –, but Alexis heard the troubled edge in her voice.

"All right?" the shorter one called back as he raised a hand in greeting and jogged lightly across the street. He had on a dark green t-shirt underneath an open, dark-colored jacket and dark jeans and sneakers. His companion was a few inches taller and trailed a few feet behind him, wearing a light-colored plaid button-down, jeans, and nicer sneakers. His words sounded like a question, but at the same time they didn't, Alexis thought, perplexed.

Her aunt had stopped, Alexis and Sara stopping with her, Corey coming up quickly behind them and taking a place at their aunt's side. The two men stopped a few feet away, appraising them.

"You lot look rough." It was the same one who had greeted them before, the shorter one. He had an accent – some kind of British, she thought, but she couldn't be sure of which area. It was a very attractive voice, and it fit him well. Alexis would have blushed if she were the blushing type.

"Well, it's been quite a day," her aunt said diplomatically. "You two aren't hurt, are you? We saw a robot heading that way." She assessed them as she indicated the direction they'd come from. Alexis thought she would have sounded like a crazy person but for her cool, even tone.

"We're okay," the taller one replied with a neutral American accent. "We were inside when it went by. There were these two…other things with it. The aliens, I guess. Dunno what to call them. They had way too many legs and moved incredibly fast."

"We saw them, too," Aunt Rachel said, nodding. "And I think you can just call them 'aliens' and we'll know what you're talking about," she finished dryly.

"Right," the American said, smiling sheepishly. "Well, I'm Garrett, and this is Rhys." He held out his hand.

Aunt Rachel leaned forward and clasped his hand, shaking it. "I'm Rachel, and these three are my nieces and nephew, Corey, Alexis, and Sara," she said, indicating each of them in turn.

"Pleasure to meet you. Only wish it was better circumstances," Garrett said wistfully.

"Were," Alexis said softly in a knee-jerk reaction.

"Alex," her aunt warned under her breath. Alexis rolled her eyes as her aunt said to the strangers at a normal volume, "Agreed. Are your cell phones working? We haven't been able to get ours to turn on since this flash of bright light while we were at the mall. It seemed to turn off everything electronic in the area."

Rhys nodded. "Yeah, we saw the light. Car turned off while we were riding in it. Put us in a bit of a sitch," he said, sharing a look with his companion.

"And you weren't able to get it started again?" Her aunt's tone suggested she already knew the answer.

"Not even a sputter," Garrett answered, frustration evident in his voice.

"Easy, mate," Rhys said, placing a hand on Garrett's shoulder in mock support. "He's got this sort of affair with his car," he said in a stage whisper to the four of them.

Garrett elbowed him good-naturedly, and Alexis said a little disdainfully, "Must be a guy thing," which earned her a pointed look from her aunt.

"Well, I think it's just an _American _thing," Rhys said, grinning, either not picking up on Alexis' tone or ignoring it.

"Where are you from, if you don't mind?" her aunt asked.

"'Cross the pond. Thought I'd be missing out on the big show when I heard one of those ships was over Cardiff – my home town. Guess I'm not missing anything after all."

Standing here, in the middle of a deserted street in an unfamiliar city, Alexis felt like she was a world away from her friends and family. But at least her aunt, brother, and cousin were here with her, and the rest of her family was just a few miles away outside the city. Most of her friends were down in Philly, but at least they were on the same continent. She shoved aside the unexpected pang of homesickness at the thought of all of them.

Aunt Rachel gave Rhys a sympathetic look but didn't comment. "We're heading up towards West End, just past Beacon Street. I don't suppose you've been up that way since all this happened."

"We just came from Cheers, actually. Probably passed right by your car," Garrett answered. He hesitated before continuing, shooting a glance at Sara, who was leaning heavily on their aunt.

Aunt Rachel sighed lightly. "I was hoping that what happened at the mall was an isolated incident; obviously that's not the case. I just need to know if I should keep going in that direction…with my family," she said, looking at the pair meaningfully.

"It's about the same there as it is here, from what we saw," Garrett hedged tentatively.

Aunt Rachel nodded thoughtfully. Turning to Corey and Alexis, she rearranged her face into a smile and then turned back to the two men. "Well, then, I guess we'll be on our way. It's been a long day and I think we're all ready to go home."

"No worries," Rhys replied, shrugging. "We were just heading back to the hotel."

"Park Plaza," Garrett clarified. "Did you pass it at all?"

Their aunt shook her head. "No, we came up Boylston, sorry."

"Well, we'll just have to take our chances then." Garrett winked at Alexis, momentarily distracting her from the frustration of having no clue where any of these things were that they were talking about. "We should get going, too. Nice to meet you all," he said genuinely.

"Don't you mean 'y'all'?" Rhys teased lightly.

"It was nice to meet you, too," Aunt Rachel replied, smiling at their banter, adding as they turned to leave, "and good luck."

"You, too," Garrett said, raising a hand in farewell. Rhys nodded at them, and then the duo was walking in the opposite direction.

It was only a few seconds later when Sara said without her usual enthusiasm, "I'm tired. I don't wanna walk anymore."

Alexis rolled her eyes. She felt like telling the kid to suck it up, that they were all ready for the day to be over, but somehow she didn't think that would go over very well with her aunt.

"It's not that much farther," Aunt Rachel said reluctantly.

"Come here, ya little monster," Corey suddenly said, ducking playfully behind them. Coming up behind the youngster, he grabbed Sara by her sides and lifted her into the air, making her squeal in delight. Twirling her around once, he placed her back on the ground gently and knelt down, his back to her. "Come on, get up before I change my mind!" he said over his shoulder. She eagerly jumped on his back and he groaned, pretending to have difficulty standing up. "Man, you weigh a _ton_!"

"No, I don't!" Sara insisted. "You're just not strong anymore."

"Be careful there," Alexis teased. "A man's ego is a very delicate thing."

Corey rolled his eyes but didn't reply, and after that the group fell silent. Alexis decided to learn the street signs and the names of the businesses and buildings they passed, but instead of learning them she found herself likening them to things she was familiar with from Philadelphia. That statue off to the right, with the guy riding the horse with one leg in the air, reminded her of the statue at City Hall – and to her left, a sign for Marlborough Street, just like the one in Fishtown –

Alexis took a deep breath and looked down, suddenly very interested in the sidewalk. This wouldn't do. No, this wouldn't do at all. She couldn't get homesick now, of all times. She was too far away from home to be there any time soon, and a pining desire to go would just make her feel worse. To prove the point to herself, she counted everything that had to happen before she got home: they had to finish walking back to the car (which seemed to be taking forever to Alexis, though that was probably just because she was so eager to get there); they had to drive back to Aunt Rachel and Uncle Todd's house; Alexis and the rest of her family had to pack their stuff; and then there was the six-hour car ride back to Philly…

She wasn't really seeing the streets anymore, so she didn't notice when they arrived at the parking garage until her aunt was herding them inside. Alexis noticed that the conspicuous lack-of-people thing seemed to be following them around, but she tried pushing it from her mind as well, instead thinking about the fact that they were now a step closer to a familiar place – even if it was only Aunt Rachel's home and not her own.

"Finally," she breathed out when they rounded a corner and she spotted her aunt's SUV, parked on the end closest to them. Rushing up to the car, she waited impatiently at the door as the others approached at a more leisurely pace.

Aunt Rachel took her keys from her pocket and very deliberately pressed the button on the fob, and to Alexis' great relief the car beeped and the four-ways flashed. Wasting no time, Alexis got in the now-unlocked car and plopped down in the back seat.

"Well, at least the electricity's still working in the car," Aunt Rachel said as she opened the door to the driver's seat, only a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

Alexis watched as Corey deposited Sara on the ground and the rest of them got into the car. "Well I'm just hoping the electricity is still working at _home_." She lowered her voice and continued, "I feel so friggin' disconnected."

"At least you weren't in the middle of a text when your phone turned off," Corey said, getting into the front seat.

"No, but I have one waiting for me from Bethany, and I'm kind of dying to know what it was about," she said, hoping she was adding the right amount of annoyance to her voice. Truthfully she hadn't thought of it since the robot at the mall; she shuddered at the far too recent memory.

She turned her attention to her aunt in the front seat and watched in anticipation as she inserted the key into the ignition and turned it. Alexis couldn't help the little, "Yes!" that came out under her breath when she heard the engine purr to life. She'd never been a car person, but she really loved that car at that very moment.

"All right, buckle up," their aunt said as she put the car in reverse and turned around, putting her arm around the back of Corey's seat while she did the customary check for oncoming traffic.

"I don't think any of the other cars in here are moving," Alexis told her aunt, only half-jokingly.

"It never hurts to check," Aunt Rachel replied airily, turning to face front again.

Alexis smiled a little to herself, until she looked over and saw her normally energetic cousin sitting motionless in her seat, staring out the window at the silent parking garage. She hesitated a moment, then reached over and took the closer of Sara's hands in one of her own and whispered as softly as she could, "Hey, Sara."

Sara looked over at her and Alexis beckoned her with one finger, leaning over the seat between them. Following her lead, Sara leaned over as well, and Alexis placed a cupped hand beside her mouth, shielding the sound from the two in the front. She felt very juvenile doing it, but she figured it would help endear her as well as actually help keep the sound from reaching them.

"You wanna know a secret?" Alexis asked conspiratorially.

Sara nodded at her, rapt with attention.

Leaning in as close as she could get, Alexis whispered almost in Sara's ear, "I'm scared, too." Sara's eyes widened a little and Alexis continued hastily, "A lot of crazy stuff happened today. But I want you to remember that as long as our Aunt Rachel is here, we're all gonna be okay; you got it?"

Sara nodded one last time, and Alexis leaned back again in her seat. She considered retracting her hand as well, but decided against it at the last second. The kid needed someone to cling to, and while Alexis wasn't very comfortable being that someone, she'd endure it for the ride home – just until they got back to Sara's parents. Alexis sincerely hoped that the group that had gone to the park would be back by the time her own group returned.

Sighing, she leaned her head gently against the window. Twenty minutes to get back to her aunt's house from here. Less, probably, because none of the other cars on the road were actually moving to create traffic and none of the traffic lights were working to tell them to stop at all. Twenty minutes or less until she was out of this nightmare. Twenty minutes until she could get online, find out how her friends were, and begin to forget what had happened. Twenty minutes until her world returned to normal.

She could not wait.

* * *

><p>AN: I feel like this chapter ended up being far less action than I had planned, but that's the way these things happen. You just never know when something might blow up in their faces. ;-) This chapter's title is another one from _War of the Worlds_ – so help me, I'm a junkie.

With season two premiering in a week (yay!), I have to inform you that this story will definitely be AU after the first season. All the events that happened in the first season will remain the same in this story's 'verse, but I can pretty much guarantee that the things that happen in this story will not jive with whatever happens in season two. And that is all I will say about that!

In case you're curious, the statue Alexis sees in this chapter is the George Washington Statue while walking along Arlington Street, and the one she's reminded of from City Hall in Philly is the John F. Reynolds statue.

And last but not least, please drop me a line in a review (or more than a line, if you are so inclined!). I love to hear what other people think of the story so far!


	7. Chapter 7: The Rapture

Alexis watched the scenery pass by as they left the parking garage, angrily noting empty street after empty street. _Shouldn't the police be out or something?_ she thought. _Even if the police get overwhelmed…shouldn't the National Guard be out here? Isn't there anyone at all trying to help?_

But then again, there didn't seem to be any civilians around, either. A chilling thought entered her mind: what if the guys they had met on their way to the car were the only people left in the city? She shoved the thought aside as quickly as she could. That was _not_ something she wanted to think about.

But what about the armed forces? Surely _someone_ was fighting the aliens. The local yokels _should_ be handling the unrest that _should_ be filling the streets, and the army or the marines or whoever the hell could be out there _should_ be out there, right now, blowing up those freaking alien ships!

Maybe that meant no one could fight them. Maybe they didn't know how. No, Alexis decided, shaking her head. Even if they didn't know how, there was sure to be some gung-ho suicidal soldiers out there, giving it everything they had, going down in a blaze of glory, even if it didn't do anything. But Alexis didn't _see_ any of it. No police, no soldiers, no tanks with big-ass guns on them barreling down the street…

Then there was the fact that none of the technology seemed to be working anymore. She was sure the military had safeguards against EMPs (or whatever that light was), but it _was_ alien technology. Maybe whatever protection they had in place hadn't cut it. Then again her aunt's car was working somehow. Maybe whatever had saved the car was in the all of the military's technology, too.

Maybe they couldn't help because they were already dead. That thought stopped Alexis cold. Not every single one of them, of course, but maybe enough to weaken their forces significantly? Enough to throw the troops into disarray? Enough to slow down the response?

Alexis suddenly realized how very little she knew about the aliens – how very little anyone in the general populace knew – about where they'd come from, their society, their objectives, and their tactics. Sure, maybe some governmental big-wigs knew a thing or two, but even if they did, she wasn't counting on getting any information from them any time soon.

"You know," she broke the silence, "Garrett had a point. Are we just going to keep calling them 'the aliens'? We should probably call them something else."

"Like what?" Corey asked, his tone suggesting he really didn't want to know what she was thinking.

"I like 'prawns'," she replied, grinning.

Corey snorted in the front seat. "And what are we going to call the robots, 'cybermen'?"

"Oh my gosh, it's perfect!" Alexis gushed, only half-joking, knowing full well that he wasn't being serious.

"Okay, cybermen I get," Aunt Rachel joined in, amusement coloring her voice. "But how in the world do the aliens remind you of fish?"

"They don't. Prawns are what they called the aliens in _District 9_,"Alexis explained smartly. "The aliens in that movie and these ones actually have a lot in common: they're huge, butt-ugly, a shade of the color 'gross' somewhere between mud and puke, and have weird tentacle things around their mouths," she said, counting off each item on her fingers. "Or what I'm assuming are their mouths."

"One major difference: they're invading us, not crash-landing on us by accident," Corey pointed out.

"Psh, details," Alexis replied, waving her free hand carelessly. "Besides, the ship in _District 9_ never actually crashed." Looking over at her cousin, she shook the hand that was still holding hers. "Hey, what do you think, Sara? Prawns and cybermen?"

"Oh, come on, she doesn't even know where the words come from," Corey protested as a smile broke out on Sara's face for the first time in too long and she exclaimed, "Yeah!"

"Sorry, bro," Alexis said, not sorry at all. "The back seat has come to a consensus."

"Yeah, all _two_ of you," Corey said, exasperated. "Aunt Rachel? Back me up here?"

"Sorry, Corey," Aunt Rachel said playfully. "Unless you can think of something better, I think we're stuck with it."

"_Anything_ would be better," he muttered, but Alexis could tell he was done arguing it, and she smiled in victory.

"Uh…Aunt Rachel?" Corey said suddenly, a warning and a question in his voice.

"I see it," Aunt Rachel replied grimly, all traces of jest from a moment ago gone from her voice.

"See what?" Alexis said, hoping no one else noticed the nervous edge in her voice. She leaned into the middle seat, trying to see out the front of the car as she felt them slowing down.

"The bridge," Corey answered. "It's gone."

"What do you mean, it's gone?" Alexis demanded.

"I mean, it's _gone_," he replied unhelpfully.

The car came to a stop and Aunt Rachel put it in reverse, starting a three-point turn to head back the way they had come. As the car turned sideways, Alexis looked out her window and finally saw what the other two had seen.

Less than 20 feet ahead of where the car had stopped, the bridge just _ended_. There was a whole lot of _nothing_ where the bridge should have been, although the other end of the bridge was intact, starting up again near the opposite shore. The jagged concrete edges of the torn roadway were visible even from this angle. It looked like a giant had rushed down the river, knocking out the bridge's midsection on its way through. Alexis hoped no one was on the bridge when it was destroyed, but considering the number of cars sitting motionless on the two sections of intact bridge, she decided it was unlikely, and she added it to the list of things to try not to think about.

They went down another street and came to another bridge a minute later. Once again Alexis wished that they were in Philly so that she would know exactly where they were. The car was silent as they approached and saw that the midsection of this one was also ripped out. Without a word, Aunt Rachel turned the car around and headed back the way they came. Alexis started to wonder if all the bridges in the city had been destroyed. She sure hoped not, because how else how were they going to cross the river?

They passed the first bridge on their way back and came to a third one a minute later. Alexis wondered idly how many bridges this city had. Not readily finding an intact bridge was more than a little annoying, but with the roads clear of moving traffic, they were able to move fairly freely, and Alexis was grateful for that at least. She was beyond ready to get back to her aunt's house.

Alexis strained to see the bridge out the window as they approached. From a distance it appeared undamaged. She crossed her fingers as they turned onto the bridge, not wanting to say anything and jinx it.

She breathed a sigh of relief when they turned onto the bridge and it looked good to go. Although maybe "good" wasn't the right word for it. There were abandoned cars all over the place, just like on all the other roads, and the whole thing was freaking Alexis out. In the heart of one of the busiest cities in the country there were no _people_. It was like in the Bible where all those people suddenly disappeared. The Rapture, it was called. The faithful were taken up into heaven and, if she was remembering correctly, everyone else was left to fend for themselves on an Earth that quickly became a wasteland. The story had literally put the fear of God in her when she was younger, but she hadn't thought of it in a while. Now, though…if she hadn't seen the robot and the aliens herself, she would have thought this was the Rapture from her childhood Sunday school days.

Alexis watched out the window as the scenery passed with a kind of reluctant fascination. As unsettling as it was, she couldn't seem to look away. She put it down to a combination of an unfamiliar place (she was always a bit wide-eyed in new places) and unusual circumstances (no people were around, something unheard of in a city this size).

Suddenly Alexis was jarred out of her thoughts as several things happened all at once – she was thrown forward against her seatbelt and the breaks were squealing, and Corey was yelling in the front seat, "Watch out!" and Sara was screaming–

The car came to a halt. "What's going on?" Alexis asked frantically, heart pounding in her chest, as their aunt said, "Is everyone all right?"

Alexis looked over at Sara, who was whimpering softly. "Sara? Are you OK?"

The girl didn't give any indication that she'd heard Alexis. She was staring at the back of the seat in front of her.

"Sara!"

This time she looked over at Alexis, and Alexis thought she felt her heart break at the terrified expression on her young cousin's face. "Are you hurt?"

Sara shook her head mutely, and Alexis turned her attention back to the front of the car, suddenly furious.

"What the hell was that for?" she yelled, surprising even herself at the outburst. She'd never yelled at her aunt like that before.

"Shut up, Alexis, there's a guy out there!" Corey yelled right back at her.

Alexis didn't even get a chance to reply before her aunt yelled, "All right, you two, stop it right now!" Their aunt took a deep breath in the stunned silence that followed and then said in a more normal voice, "I'm going out to talk to him. You all stay here and _don't fight_." She looked Corey and Alexis each in the eye while she said the last part.

Alexis silently fell back in her seat. She squashed down the huff of annoyance bubbling up inside her. Her aunt was dead serious right now; she'd never seen her this angry before. Alexis suddenly wondered how her aunt was taking all this alien stuff. She'd seemed okay up until a minute ago, but now Alexis wondered if maybe she was scared like the rest of them. Corey might be the only one who hadn't acknowledged it yet, but he had to be scared, too. He'd be crazy not to be.

After her aunt turned off the car and stepped out, she leant forward again, straining to see through the front windshield, hoping to catch a glimpse of this mystery man. She gave up after about ten seconds and said as nicely as she could, "Core?"

After a second he answered her. "Yeah."

"Where'd Aunt Rachel go? I mean, I didn't see that guy at all."

"She's talking to him over there," Corey pointed vaguely forward and to their left – the one place Alexis didn't have a good angle to see.

She sighed. "'Kay." As an afterthought, she added, "Thanks."

"No problem," he said, his voice softer this time. It was as close to apologizing as either of them did.

Suddenly his body stiffened in the front seat.

"Corey? What's wrong?" she asked hesitantly, cursing her voice for wavering. What else could possibly go wrong today? Hadn't enough crap been dumped on them already?

"Dunno," he said shortly, sitting up straighter in his seat. "But get ready."

"Get ready? For what?" she asked, confused. Her heart started beating faster again. _And I was just getting over the heart attack from when the car stopped_, she thought dryly.

"For anything, Alex. Something's wrong. Aunt Rachel's coming this way with that guy, and she doesn't look happy," he said grimly.

"Thanks, that's so helpful," she said, venting some of her apprehension and frustration with sarcasm.

"Shut up," he hissed as the driver's side door opened.

Their aunt leaned over the seat, glancing at each of them. She was wearing a tight smile, and Alexis' heart sank. She suddenly had no desire to hear her aunt was about to say.

"Okay, kids, time to get out. We're going to make a real adventure out of this and walk for a bit."

Alexis didn't miss the edge in her aunt's voice. She also didn't miss the man standing right behind her. From his build he looked like an adult, but she couldn't see much more of him than that.

"Aunt Rachel?" Alexis started to say.

"Alex," her aunt cut her off. "Why don't you help Sara out of her booster seat? Now." She gave Alexis a pointed look.

Alexis swallowed nervously. She wanted to ask more questions, but was starting to realize that they might be in real danger – for what was probably the tenth time today. She turned to her younger cousin and started undoing the fastenings on the booster seat. "Hey, kiddo, we're gonna go for a walk; how does that sound?"

Alexis realized that was the wrong thing to say when Sara started screaming that ear-piercing scream that only children can produce. "No! I'm riding in the car! Stop! I'm tired, I'm not walking!" She tried to push Alexis' hands off of the booster seat.

"Sara, stop it!" Alexis tried to yell over the hysterical 6-year-old. Alexis didn't know what was going on, but she could guess, and she didn't want to put them in any more danger by having an out-of-control child to deal with.

Alexis struggled with her cousin for what seemed like a long time, but was probably only a few seconds. Corey had already gotten out of the car and disappeared to who knew where, and Aunt Rachel slid out of the front seat and opened up the back door to where Sara was. She grabbed Sara's arms and said to Alexis, "I have her, undo the straps."

Something in her aunt's voice told her to hurry, so she did, and as soon as the girl was free, Rachel took her into her arms as best she could, pressing Sara's head into her shoulder. "It's okay, hun, I'll carry you."

Alexis scrambled out of the car and looked over just in time to see her aunt handing the car keys to the man. Corey was standing at the front of the car looking like it was taking everything he had not to intervene. It probably was. She walked up and stood beside him, looking at the man. He was an adult like she thought, but not as old as her aunt – maybe in his late 20s. He was dressed really warmly for the season, with a big coat on, which she thought was odd. Other than that, though, there was nothing remarkable about him. He looked just like any other guy off the street.

Rachel walked stiffly away from him, angling her body away from his as she passed so that her back was to him and she was between him and Sara. Alexis wondered if she thought he was going to hurt Sara. She watched, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, as the man got in the car, turned it on, and started backing up. She watched as he turned the car around and started driving back the way they had come. The sound of the motor faded as he got further and further away, and then he went around a curve and was out of sight.

After a few seconds Alexis realized Sara was crying softly and her aunt was murmuring comforting words to her. She looked at where the car had disappeared down the road. "What are we going to do now?" she asked numbly.

"We walk," Aunt Rachel answered. She sounded as strung out as Alexis felt.

"All the way to your house?" Alexis asked incredulously, finally turning to look at her.

"Unless you have a car hidden in that monstrous purse of yours, or one of our cell phones magically starts working, yes, Alex, we're walking the whole way," Corey said cuttingly.

"Why are you being such a jerk?" she said angrily. She couldn't help the anger that suddenly boiled inside of her. The way he always treated her like a two-year-old was infuriating.

"Why are you being so naïve!" he snapped back.

"Both of you stop." Their aunt's voice was firm but soft. She probably didn't want to disturb Sara, who looked like she was finally calming down. "We need to get going if we're going to make decent time. You can bicker all you want when we get back to the house, but for now I need you to act like mature adults. Enough has happened today without you two going at it, too. Let's get going."

Aunt Rachel's tone brooked no arguments, so they started walking. Alexis shot one last glare Corey's way, but he wasn't paying attention and it was wasted.

Alexis sighed to herself. She decided to try to ignore everything else – the aliens, the man that had taken her aunt's car, even Corey – and think about how happy she was going to be when she was back home with the rest of her family.

She just hoped they were all okay.

* * *

><p>AN: Sorry it's been so long since I last updated! This story was back-burnered for a couple of reasons, but the other day I got an e-mail update saying someone new was following this story! It got me really excited, so I'm going to try to actually keep going with this story, since at least one person out there might still read it haha. Can't make any promises about the story, as I've kind of fell off the Falling Skies horse (I haven't seen ANY of season three yet, mostly due to life being crazy), but I will try to complete it. It's going to be a long one if I do.

And to confirm something a previous A/N had said, this will DEFINITELY be AU after the first season. Everything in the first season is exactly how it happened in the show, but from there it will be diverging in some pretty big ways. You have been warned. Also, you have my permission to yell at me if I screw something from the first season up. :-D

As always, reviews make my day! And if you do decide to review, please tell me if you didn't like something and why – at this point all the major stuff is planned out for this story, but I may still be able to incorporate some suggestions. Thanks for reading!


	8. Chapter 8: Sharpening the Axe

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."  
>Abraham Lincoln<p>

Walking, Alexis reflected, was not a very expedient way of traveling. In fact, it was just about the slowest way of getting from point A to point B besides actually crawling – and it almost felt like they were crawling, at this pace. Sara kept getting shuffled back and forth between her aunt and brother, and the group had to go slow enough to accommodate whoever was carrying her. They didn't go in a straight line, either. Their aunt had them weaving in between the main street and side alleys in order to pass through the area as stealthily as possible. If they thought they heard someone or something, they would change directions. Their aunt said it was because they didn't know who else could be out there and they didn't want to be too visible. Alexis realized it was probably a good idea to be cautious, after everything that had happened today, but that knowledge didn't make her aching feet feel any better. She tried asking her aunt a few times about what had happened with that guy and the car, but each time her aunt just said they'd talk about it later and gave her a look that told her not to argue.

The worst part about it was – okay, scratch that. There were a lot of equally crappy things vying the number one spot on the list of crappy things. For one, between the heat and the exertion, Alexis was really starting to sweat; even putting her hair up in a ponytail to get it off of her neck and back hadn't done much. But one of the biggest things for Alexis was that she had no way of telling the time. She estimated they'd been walking for well over an hour by the time they left what she thought of as the business district and entered the more suburban area. She knew from previous visits that that meant they were getting very close to Aunt Rachel's house, but if anything, the thought of being so close but not there yet just made her legs and feet hurt more.

The last stretch of their trip, through the residential area, took the longest. They kept hearing things and even saw a fair number of people – nothing close to the number that should have been out on a nice early summer day, but more than they had in the main part of the city. Alexis wanted to talk to them – any of them – and figure out what was going on, but her aunt kept shooing them in the opposite direction, and since Alexis was directionally challenged to begin with, she gave up trying to make sense of the winding route they took to get back to the house. Their aunt knew where she was going, and that was all that mattered, Alexis decided wearily.

When they finally got to their aunt's house, they slipped in quietly through the back door. As they approached, Alexis noticed there were no cars in the driveway, and it made her angry; she had expected her parents and the rest of their extended family to be home by now. Sara had long since fallen asleep in Aunt Rachel's arms, so as soon as they were inside, Aunt Rachel laid her down on the couch and beckoned Corey and Alexis into the kitchen.

Alexis followed Corey into the kitchen reluctantly. She was hot and sweaty and exhausted, both mentally and physically. She just wanted to get a shower, go to sleep, and not wake up until the world was back to normal. Their aunt, however, had other ideas.

"All right," Aunt Rachel began, taking a deep breath and then exhaling just as deeply. Alexis would have groaned, but she was too tired. She just knew that whatever her aunt was about to say was going to make her day worse. "A lot of things happened today, and I have a feeling this isn't the end of it, unfortunately. So we're going to take care of a few things and prepare as best as we can, and I'll need both of you to help. And I want to keep Sara out of all of this as much as possible. Is that understood?"

"Sure," Alexis shrugged.

"What do we need to do?" Corey asked.

Aunt Rachel sighed. "I'm not sure how long all this will last. Hopefully the government will get its butt moving soon and this'll be over fairly quickly. But there aren't any signs of that yet, so for now we have to work on the assumption that we're on our own."

And very quickly the conversation was turning down a path Alexis had been trying to keep her own mind from going down. She could almost feel the anxiety rising within her for the hundredth time that day as she asked, "What do you mean, on our own?"

"Well, for starters, no electricity." Aunt Rachel held up her phone, its screen dark. "That means no phone calls since I don't have a landline anymore, no computers, no e-mail, no air conditioning…The temperature's fine at the moment, but any day now it's going to start getting warmer as summer rolls in, and we need to be ready for the heat."

Alexis begged to differ about the temperature. Just the walk back to Aunt Rachel's house had made her break out in a sweat. Granted, she'd been on edge, looking over her shoulder the entire time for aliens or other people, and she tended to overheat easily…but still. It was _already_ hot outside. Inside it wasn't so bad; even though the AC wasn't working right now, it was still fairly cool in the house. She didn't want to think about what it was going to be like if a heat wave came before they got electricity back, though.

"I'm getting ahead of myself, though," their aunt continued. "We got separated when the robot – the cyberman, I suppose – attacked the mall. What happened to you two after that? Where did you go?"

Alexis exchanged a look with Corey, suddenly remembering the woman from the food court. From the guilty look on his face, he was just now remembering her, too. They told their aunt what had happened, and when they got to the woman being killed, Rachel closed her eyes and bowed her head.

"We were going to tell you sooner, call the police, whatever…" Alexis began, thinking she was angry at them for not doing anything.

"But things never calmed down enough to," Corey finished when she trailed off.

Aunt Rachel put up a hand. "It's okay. There's nothing we can do about it now, and certainly nothing you could have done then. And unfortunately, that kind of situation may come up again. You made the right decision in leaving her. We have to look out for ourselves before anyone else, as cruel as it sounds."

"But what if someone really needs help?" Alexis began, outraged at the idea of ignoring people who were in danger. _Even though you did it yourself earlier today_, a little voice in the back of her head said. "She was dead," Alexis gulped, "so we – we couldn't have done anything for her, but what if we find someone hurt? We're not going to do anything?"

"You can only help others if you keep yourself safe," Aunt Rachel cut in. "We do it every day at my job. When the situation might be dangerous for us, we wait until the police get there and make sure everything's okay before we enter the scene and start treating the patient. You can't help anyone if you get hurt yourself."

Their aunt worked as an EMT for the city and had seen some pretty crazy things at work – or at least that's what Alexis' mother was always telling her. It was one of the reasons Alexis and Corey were always joking with their parents that if computers became sentient and tried to take over the world like in the movies, they would move in with their aunt in Boston. She knew what to do in emergencies. It sucked that they weren't at home because they were so far away from everything and everyone familiar to them, but at least their aunt was here.

Another thought struck Alexis. "Where do you think our parents are? And Jamie and Uncle Todd and the rest of the family? I mean, we walked most of the way here. They should have gotten here way before us." Now that they were back safely, all of the things she'd been trying to ignore were taking over her thoughts. "And what about all the other people? We only saw, like, a dozen people on the way home. Compared to normal, it was a ghost town!"

"I'm sure a lot of people are hiding because they're scared," her aunt began.

"But not everybody can be hiding!" Alexis interrupted impatiently. "There are too many people in this city for all of them to be hiding!"

"Oh, come on. Where do you _think_ they are, genius?" Corey said, annoyed. "Did you miss the giant robot killing everybody at the mall or what?"

"You think that happened at the park, too?" Alexis asked, horrified.

"Why would they send one of those things to the mall and nowhere else? They probably have them all over the city, and in the other cities, too. Who knows what happened to them?" he ended bitterly.

"But there were no bodies," Alexis argued, her mind rejecting the implications of what he was saying. "We didn't see any bodies on the way home. Not one. If they killed everyone, there would be bodies."

"I think it's a little too early to jump to any conclusions," Aunt Rachel cut in. "For now, we wait this out until we figure out what happened to the rest of the family. With any luck, the government will have the situation under control by then. Until then, we have work to do. No power means no fridge. The food in there is only going to last a few more hours, so tonight we're going to eat what we can and throw the rest out. I'll be cleaning out the fridge and making dinner. Alexis, I need you to find as many buckets and large containers as you can and fill them with water. Once you're done with that, I need you to scrub the bathtub and fill it, too."

Alexis nearly groaned aloud at the thought of more work. "Why? Won't the water keep working, even though the power is out?"

"We'll still be able to get water from the water tower while it lasts, but once that's gone, there might not be any more until they get the power back on," her aunt explained. "The buckets should be clean, but make sure you clean the bathtub well before you fill it with water. We'll still have to purify and disinfect it if we need to drink it, but cleaning the tub will make that a lot easier."

"But I have to get a shower tonight…" Alexis said. She definitely needed one – the sweat from the walk home was starting to dry on her skin and it was making her clothes stick to her skin, making her feel grungy.

"We'll all get showers before you do the tub," Rachel said. "Fill the tub last and make sure everyone's done with showers before then, okay?"

"Got it," Alexis muttered unhappily. She felt like complaining about all the unnecessary work, but at the same time was too exhausted. The power wouldn't be out long enough to make all this worth the effort – they were in a major city, after all. But her aunt was on a roll.

"Corey, I need you to scrounge around the house for a few things – I'll make a list," Rachel continued. She took a pad of paper and a pen sitting on the counter and started writing. "Flashlights, batteries, duct tape…"

"What do we need duct tape for?" Corey asked.

Aunt Rachel smiled. "Duct tape holds the world together."

Alexis heard Corey mutter something, but couldn't quite make out what.

"We have to be prepared for anything," their aunt continued, the smile gone just as quickly as it had come, her expression somber as she continued writing. "That man who took the car proved that things are already starting to fall apart. Without the ability to call for the police, it might get pretty lawless out there, and we need to take that into account in everything we do. No going out by yourselves, for starters. We're all staying in the house for now."

"So can you tell us what happened with that guy yet?" Alexis asked, some of the exasperation she was feeling slipping into her tone, too tired to hold back completely. "Why did you give him your car? Do you know him or something?"

"That's what she's saying," Corey said, even more exasperated. "He stole the car. You didn't know him, right, Aunt Rachel?"

Aunt Rachel shook her head. "No," she began, but Alexis interrupted her.

"But it's not his car! How could you have just let him take it?" She found herself starting to get mad. It was just one thing after another today – first she'd been chased through the mall by a freaking _giant alien robot_ and saw it kill a bunch of people, almost getting killed herself, and then walked for who knew how long to get back here, and now her aunt was giving her chores and all she could think about was the fact that her feet hurt and they'd _had_ a car, so why couldn't they have just stayed in it?

"He showed me a gun and told me he was taking the car," Aunt Rachel interrupted back firmly, stopping Alexis cold. She set the pad of paper and pen down on the counter and sighed. "I didn't want to tell you then and alarm you all, but I wasn't going to risk anyone's life on the chance that he was bluffing."

"He had a gun? Isn't that carjacking?" Alexis asked, shocked by the revelation. They'd been carjacked by a man with a gun and she hadn't known until this very moment.

"Yes, and once all this is over, I'll be reporting it to the police. But with no phones there's no way to contact them besides going to the station, and I don't think that's a good idea right now."

"You think there are more people like him out there?" Corey asked.

"I just don't know," their aunt said wearily. "And until we know more, we're playing it safe. Which means staying inside and making worst-case scenario preparations – like stockpiling water and taking stock of food and anything useful I have laying around. So let's get to it," she finished, giving each of them a pointed look.

Alexis sighed heavily and turned to leave, stopping when she heard Corey address their aunt.

"What are we supposed to tell Sara?"

Alexis turned around. It was a good question (not that she would ever tell him that). Sara was bound to ask a million and one questions as soon as she woke up from her exhaustion-induced nap.

Their aunt sighed for what might have been the tenth time that day and paused for a moment before answering. "Don't lie to her, if that's what you mean. If she asks you about what's going on, tell her what you can – just remember that she's only six years old, and she's been through a lot today. We all have," she added, looking down for a moment. Alexis shuddered, thinking about what had happened at the mall and then later with the car. "And we have enough to worry about without adding a distraught child into the mix, so let's not make it any worse than we have to, okay?"

Corey nodded and Alexis mumbled her agreement and left hastily, hoping the work would go quickly and that this day would be over soon.

* * *

><p>AN: A lot more talking and a lot less action happened this chapter than usual – hope it doesn't scare anyone away. There will be plenty of action later to make up for it, promise. ;-) As always, please review if you have a moment – tell me what I did right, what I did wrong, whatever! Thanks for reading!


	9. Chapter 9: And I Feel Fine

Sara didn't wake up for the rest of the afternoon, and after they were done with the tasks their aunt had assigned to them, Alexis and Corey were pretty much left to their own devices, their aunt busy with…well, something. She progressed steadily around the house, bringing things up from the basement, taking other things down. Alexis didn't know what she was doing, but it looked like work, so she didn't really care as long as she was left out of it. And since Corey generally wanted nothing to do with Alexis if he could help it and they weren't being allowed out of the house, that meant she had nothing else to do but go to the room that was "hers" while they visited and try to occupy herself there. Normally that wouldn't be difficult, but no power meant she had significantly fewer options for keeping busy than normal.

She walked in and looked around the room, trying to think of things she could do that didn't require electricity. There wasn't much, and it didn't help that this wasn't her room at home where most of her books were. Not that she felt like reading, oddly enough. She _wanted_ to get on the internet, but no doubt the router wouldn't be working. Not that her laptop would be working either, for that matter. It worked off of the same electricity that everything else did, after all.

She sat down at the desk with her laptop on it, pulling open the screen and looking at it morosely. A frowning face stared darkly back at her in the reflection, waves forming and frizz already popping up in her long dark hair as it dried from her shower. She sighed and ran a hand down the length of her hair, wishing that just once it would stay flat without having to be manhandled to death.

On a whim she reached out and pressed the power button on her laptop–

–and looked on in shock as it started to boot up, lights coming on and the soft, familiar whir of the fan starting. It seemed abnormally loud in the otherwise silent room. She watched, enthralled, as the screen lit up and the welcome screen appeared. Typing in her password, she watched in shock as her desktop came up.

She sat there for a moment, looking at it. She had no clue why it was working, but she wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. She looked at the internet icon – no connection, which she had expected, but she also noticed the battery icon next to it. It was running off of battery power. That made sense, since there was no apparently power coming into the house (their aunt had already tried all the light switches and most of the outlets). She quickly opened up the battery settings and switched it over to power-save mode. She wanted to keep this thing working as long as she could, and who knew when her next chance to charge it would be?

A thought struck her and she quickly pulled out her phone, pressing its power button, too. Her heart dropped when the screen stayed blank and dark. She looked back at her laptop, screen bright, as if eagerly awaiting her orders. What was the difference between her phone and her laptop? Why was one working and not the other?

Well, she wasn't taking any chances. She fished her flash drive out of her backpack and plugged it in to her laptop, then copied all of her documents, music, and photos onto it. She tended not to keep hard copies of things (why bother when you could keep it on a hard drive?), so she wanted to make sure that even if her laptop crapped out on her or it ran out of battery and she couldn't recharge it soon enough, she'd still be able to access all of her writing and music and everything else she had. Once that was done, she opened up one of the documents and started typing.

"Your laptop's working?" her brother's incredulous voice suddenly came from behind her.

She whirled around to see him standing in the doorway. Apparently she'd forgotten to close the door.

"Hey, thanks for snooping. Yes, it's working. And how long have you been standing there, exactly?"

"Like two seconds, chill out," he said, coming over to the desk.

"I am chill. And no one invited you in." She glared at him and closed the lid to her laptop. No way she would let him see what was on there. Some of the writing was very personal.

"Not your house," he replied. "So how'd you get your laptop to work?"

She glared at him for another second just for good measure, then softened her expression. "I don't know how, but it's just _working_. I didn't do anything. Wish I had," she added as an afterthought. "I would have done it for my phone, too."

"Yeah, my phone's still not working, either. Well, once you're done writing your novel, you should come downstairs. Dinner's ready."

Alexis felt her cheeks flushing. "I'll be down in a minute," she mumbled. She was just grateful her brother had never gotten his hands on anything she'd written. She didn't want to think about how much he would tease her then.

He had already turned and was leaving, but stopped at the doorway and turned around. "Think fast!" he said, and threw something at her.

She yelped and ducked, instinctively reaching a hand out to swat whatever it was out of the way. Her aim being what it was, she never even made contact, but as soon as it hit the ground, she heard the tell-tale rattling sound and knew what it was.

"Can you please stop throwing my stuff around?" she shrieked, reaching around and picking up her pill bottle from the floor.

"Just making sure you don't forget to take them," he said, a flippant grin on his face.

"Thanks, _Mom_," she said, and then stopped. She'd almost forgotten about their parents still being MIA. She knew from the look on his face that he was thinking about it now, too.

He lowered his eyes and with a, "Come on, let's go eat before it gets cold," he disappeared into the hallway.

She sighed and watched him leave. She looked down at the bottle for a moment, feeling an odd sense of _déjà vu_. Hadn't almost this exact same thing happened just before dinner yesterday? It felt like much more than a day had passed since then. She shook her head to clear it, twisting the bottle open, popping a pill into her mouth, and swallowed it dry in one fluid motion. She poured about half the bottle into her hand, squinting to see inside to the other half. None of them _looked_ broken. Shoving them all back inside, she twisted the lid, tossed it onto the bed, and went to join dinner.

* * *

><p>Dinner was…quiet. Quieter than it should have been with a six-year-old in attendance. On one hand Alexis appreciated it; after the insanity of the afternoon, the quiet gathering was a nice reprieve. Unfortunately it also meant that Alexis didn't get to ask her aunt many questions on the ever-lengthening list in her mind.<p>

Her mouth was occupied plenty, though. The dining room table was so filled with food that there was barely enough room to put their plates down. There was hotdogs and salad and lunch meat and cottage cheese and so many other things that Alexis couldn't imagine the four of them being able to eat it all in one sitting. Their aunt said she put it out in case the rest of the family got home in time for dinner, that it was going to go bad if they didn't eat it tonight anyway.

The rest of the family never showed up, though, and sure enough, at the end of the meal about half the food was still there, their aunt looking at it sadly. She told them that she had put what she could fit into the freezer, but that wouldn't hold out for long – maybe a day, if they were lucky. Everything left after tomorrow would have to be thrown out if the power didn't come back on.

After dinner, her aunt roped her into helping her clean up, but after that she made a quick retreat to her room, intending to lose herself in a book. And she did, for a while, losing herself in the latest fantasy world she'd discovered, until she suddenly realized that the sun was setting and she was straining her eyes just to see the words on the page. She sighed and put the book away. She could always read by flashlight if she wanted to later, but right now she wasn't feeling it. It had felt good to escape into another world for a bit, but now the mood was broken and reality was starting to crash back down on her again.

The problem was she really wanted everything to be back to the way it was a few days ago. She wanted to be at home, with her friends and family and internet access and electricity. The whole power outage was in no way enjoyable, and that, coupled with the fact that she was stuck in a house with her brother (who was annoying and a jerk), her aunt (who was fairly cool but still an adult), and her cousin (who was six years old and, let's face it, a little too hyperactive for her own good), was making her more than a little cranky.

And after everything that had happened today, she didn't know what else _to_ do but get lost in a book. There had been a giant robot and aliens killing people, and she'd seen it happening up close. And she hadn't done anything to help. What kind of person did that? What kind of person left others to die and ran away just to save their own skin?

She suddenly realized her breaths were coming in desperate gasps, as if she'd just run a mile. She looked around the room, trying to will her breathing to slow down, but the walls were too close and suddenly she had to get out, had to be anywhere but confined in that tiny room.

She stumbled through the hallway and down the stairs, opening up the back door and stepping outside without a thought as to what she was doing or where she was going. The early evening air, cooler now that the sun was setting, hit her face, startling her, and she paused on the threshold, one hand still on the door handle.

She closed her eyes. _Get a grip on yourself_, she chastised herself. _Stop freaking out. You're not helping; you're just making it worse_.

She took a deep, shaky breath, and then another, slower, and another, gradually working her breathing down to a more normal pace. Her heart was still pounding, but she ignored that and stepped fully outside, shutting the door as quietly as she could behind her. She figured entire house had probably heard her rushing down the stairs, but maybe she could still sneak outside without them knowing. Maybe they hadn't heard the door opening.

It wasn't quite dark outside yet, but it was getting darker by the second. She almost turned around and went right back inside. But then she glanced up and she knew she had to stay, at least for a little while.

The sky above her was filled with stars – more stars than she had ever seen before with her own eyes. Growing up in a city, of course, she didn't get to see much of the stars, though she'd always had a passion for astronomy. Now, even through the dying light on the horizon, the view was breathtaking. She could barely tear her eyes away to find her way into one of the patio chairs.

She wasn't sure how long she'd been sitting there before she heard the door opening behind her and saw traces of light spilling out of it in front of her. She whirled her head around just in time to see Corey standing in the doorway before he turned the flashlight in his hand off, significantly darkening the patio. "What are you doing out here?" he whispered.

She turned her head upwards again, towards the sky. "Stargazing," she replied airily. Her voice seemed loud compared to his.

There was a pause, and Alexis thought for a moment that he had gone back inside and just forgotten to shut the door. Then she heard light shuffling and out of the corner of her eye saw him sitting down in one of the other patio chairs.

"You know we're not supposed to be out here," he whispered. "And by the way, you probably want to keep your voice down."

_Great_, she thought. _This is just what I need right now._ She gave him a dirty look, though he probably didn't see it in the low light. "And why's that?" she replied, though she lowered her voice an almost-whisper.

There was a slight pause. "You never know who might hear you."

The way he said it gave Alexis chills, as if being heard at all was dangerous. They sat in silence for a few minutes before Alexis broke it, though she brought her voice down to a whisper this time.

"Do you think the whole world has gone crazy?"

The pause was even longer this time, and for a moment Alexis thought he might not have heard her.

"That's a stupid question."

Anger boiled up inside her and she made a rude noise. "Excuse me?"

"I just meant it doesn't matter if the _whole_ world goes crazy. All it takes is a few idiots to screw things up."

She paused and considered that for a moment. They had been carjacked earlier, but no other people had tried to harm them (the prawns didn't count as people). In fact, those two guys they saw while walking to the car had been nice, despite everything that had just happened.

"I guess that makes sense," she answered slowly as she mulled it over. "People do stupid things when they're scared or confused, though. And some people will try to take advantage of the situation, like the guy who stole the car."

"Exactly. Which is why we need to be careful now and take precautions. Like listening to Aunt Rachel when she says not to go outside."

She snorted softly. "Whoda thought, out of the two of us, that _I'd_ end up being the rebel?"

"You've always been a rebel," he said, his voice serious.

She looked over at him and just barely made out the grin on his face in the near-darkness telling her he wasn't serious at all.

"Come on, let's get back inside before Aunt Rachel wonders where we went," he said, standing.

She rose from her own chair reluctantly. She wanted to stay outside and watch the stars, but it _was_ getting colder now, and the absolute darkness was starting to freak her out. Plus she was starting to get really tired. The shower earlier had helped wake her up, but the events of the day, all the adrenaline and everything that had happened, it was all starting to catch up to her.

As soon as they were inside and the door was closed, Corey clicked on his flashlight and lead the way upstairs and to her room. "Thanks," she murmured as he was leaving, but she wasn't sure if he heard her or not. At that point she didn't really care. She changed into her pajamas, too tired to bother looking around for the flashlight her aunt her given her earlier, and flopped down on the bed, barely making it under the covers before sleep claimed her.

* * *

><p>AN: I've seen a fair amount of hits on this story but no reviews of any kind lately…not sure what that means haha. For now I'll be continuing on as planned, and I apologize for my wacky updating schedule…I write as my muse and my job allow me, and the latter has become a lot less of an obstacle lately to writing, so I'm hoping updates will be a little quicker than they have been in the past. As always, please review if you have a moment; it helps keep me motivated knowing that people are actually reading the story and not just opening the page. ;-)


	10. Chapter 10: Go Fish

_Saturday, May 21, 2011_

_ The world ended yesterday._

_Not completely, of course, or I wouldn't be writing this. But it might just be the beginning of the end._

_A few days ago, aliens showed up in huge spaceships, hovering over all the major cities of the world. No one knew why they were here, but supposedly some people in the government started talking to them. I don't know how, since I haven't seen them speak yet. I don't know if they're even capable of speech – although that begs the question of how they communicate with each other. Any species advanced enough to have interstellar spacecraft and the kind of weapons we saw yesterday has to have a sophisticated language of some kind._

_We don't know where they came from, either. Not much information went out on the news before the power went out, and now we have no way of getting information from the government about them now, if the government is even still around. From what we witnessed of the attack on Boston, they have the firepower to completely decimate us if they want to. I'm still hoping it isn't like this in every major city where there was a ship, but I just don't know._

_Our parents are missing. It's pretty official now, at least in my mind. Aunt Rachel is avoiding the subject completely, which doesn't bode well. She wouldn't lie to us and tell us they were okay if she didn't believe it herself, so her silence has me worried. I haven't talked to Corey about it at all because of something he said before…I'm pretty sure he thinks they're dead. But our mom and dad, dead? I can't even imagine it. I mean, those are the people who raised us. We're not even adults yet, so how could they be dead? What would we do without them? Where would we go?_

_The rest of the family is still missing, too – Uncle Todd and Jamie, Uncle Peter and Aunt Stacy and Jackie, and Gram and Pap, too. The last we heard, they were taking Jackie and a friend of hers to the park, but we haven't heard from any of them since we left for the mall yesterday morning. It could just be that they're stuck somewhere and can't get home, but even if they had to walk like we did, they should have been home by now. It's been about a day now since the attack on the mall and the fact that they aren't back yet is making me more and more anxious by the minute._

_New topic, then. Back to the aliens. No one knows where they came from, and we're not 100% sure why they're here. The cyberman (that's what we've decided to call the giant robots until we find out their real name) did a lot of damage to the mall yesterday and killed a lot of people._

_I'd never seen a person die before yesterday. I'd never seen a dead body before yesterday. I never want to again._

_I kind of worried that I wouldn't be able to sleep last night, but I was just too tired for insomnia. I must have slept for about ten hours straight, and no one woke me up this morning, which was nice. I've mostly just been in my room trying to avoid everyone since then. I just feel like I need some time alone._

_Of all the places the aliens could come, why did they come here? Why did they kill all those people? What do they hope to gain from all of this? What do they want? They obviously have technology way beyond anything we have, so they wouldn't want ours, and they don't certainly care about keeping us alive, so it's not us they're after._

_Maybe it's not about humanity. Maybe they're just colonizing. Maybe they need a new place to live and our planet fit the bill. Apparently they can breathe Earth air perfectly fine, so maybe they just needed a new planet. Maybe their own was destroyed, or maybe their population outgrew their planet like ours will someday – or like it would have, before they killed all those people. Who knows how many people they killed? For all we know, holed up in this house in the quiet suburbs, we could be the last humans alive on planet Earth and we wouldn't even know it._

Alexis stopped writing. This wasn't working. Journaling was supposed to be therapeutic; this was just making her more anxious.

She closed her journal and set it aside, deciding to go find the rest of the family. She was suddenly starting to feel very isolated in the upstairs bedroom.

When she got downstairs she found Corey and Sara playing Go Fish in the living room. "Mind if I join you guys?" she asked. She didn't really care for the game, but she needed the company.

"Well…this game is for big kids only," Corey said doubtfully, winking at Sara. "You have to be at least…this tall to play." He stood up and held his hand up above his head.

Alexis gave him a look; he was about a foot taller than her to begin with. She couldn't even touch his hand if she wanted to – she certainly wasn't that tall. "How come the munchkin can play, then?" she said, indicating Sara.

"Because the game was the munchkin's idea," he said, sitting back down.

"It's okay, Lexi, you can play. Sit beside me," Sara said, shuffling over to make room on the couch.

"Thanks," she said, taking a seat next to her cousin.

"But you can't play until the next game. We have to finish this one first," Sara informed her.

"Okay," she said, mildly amused by her cousin as usual. She watched them play the rest of their game, glad to see Sara a little more normal – she'd been abnormally quiet at dinner last night and Alexis had been worried. Now, though, she seemed to be back to her usual boisterous self.

They played a few hands, and Alexis gradually relaxed as she fell into the familiar rhythm of the children's game. She even found herself laughing at Corey's overly obvious attempts to see Sara's cards and the way Sara got indignant and scolded him for it every time.

"So…where's Aunt Rachel?" Alexis posed the question after a few hands had been played. Their aunt had been rushing around the house all afternoon yesterday, and the whole house had been filled with an atmosphere of movement and haste; now it was calm and still. Alexis could almost imagine that everything was back to normal, if it weren't for her mind conjuring up images every few minutes of what had happened yesterday. Apparently the game was only a partial reprieve from her thoughts, though that made Alexis welcome it even more.

"She went out," Corey said vaguely.

Alexis looked at him sharply. "Where did she go?"

"Does it matter?" he said, clearly annoyed. "She should be back in the next hour or so."

"Yeah, it does. What happened to 'it's not safe to go outside'? Or does that just not apply to her or something?" Alexis said, starting to get angry.

"Alex," he said, his voice low. "Let it go."

"But what if those things come back?" she pressed on, inadvertently raising her voice. She needed to know, whether he liked it or not. "What are we going to do if they come and she's not here?"

A small whimper came from beside her on the couch and Alexis realized belatedly that she'd said precisely the wrong thing in front of her young cousin.

"Oh, shoot. Sara, I'm sorry," she apologized, suddenly wanting to kick herself. "I didn't mean…"

She wasn't sure where she was going with that statement, as she really _had_ meant what she'd said. But she felt terrible now, watching Sara's face redden. She looked like she was about to cry.

"Come here." Corey abruptly stood up and approached the couch, scooping Sara up in his arms like she was nothing and walking out of the room, giving Alexis a dirty look as he turned away but saying nothing. As he walked away she could hear him whispering something to Sara but couldn't quite make out what.

Alexis looked down at the card-filled table. A minute ago they'd all been playing a game, having fun, ostensibly without a care in the world. And now Corey was mad at her, and Sara…well, who knew. She'd never really been good with little kids, and with everything that had happened over the past few days, it was hard to remember to be extra gentle with Sara.

An intense anger suddenly filled Alexis, and before she could stop herself she had pounded a fist into the card table – so hard, in fact, that its legs rattled and the cards went everywhere.

She looked down, shocked at its intensity of the outburst. She wasn't a violent person; in fact she'd always looked down on violence as something used only by people who weren't intelligent enough to think of a better solution. She stared at the mess of cards on the table and floor, trying to push down the lump that had suddenly appeared in her throat.

Slowly, she started picking up the cards very deliberately, taking her time assembled the deck and placing it face-down in the middle of the table. She walked silently out of the room and plodded slowly up the stairs, noting somewhere in the back of her mind that she couldn't hear Corey or Sara at all. She entered "her" bedroom and shut the door behind her as quietly as she could. She climbed up onto the bed and curled up on her side, closing her eyes.

She just wanted everything to go back to normal. She wanted to be back home in Philly. She wanted the internet to work because right now all she had to talk to were the people in this house, and none of them wanted to deal with her right now.

She felt tears stinging in her eyes and she decided that here she didn't care. No one was around to see anyway. She just wanted to forget everything that had happened yesterday. An image of the dead woman at the mall food court seemed to suddenly spring up onto the back of her eyelids and she wanted to erase it from her mind, so she opened her eyes, but the only thing that did was let the tears spill out completely.

She wiped them away, hating the way they tickled her face and ran across her nose as they fell sideways. Sitting up, she stared at the window, wondering where her aunt was. Wondering if she was okay. It was a little overcast and the wind was making the trees sway uncertainly, making Alexis glad that at least she was inside.

Not that that counted for much, since at _any fucking moment_ one of those robots could come by and kill them all, she thought angrily. Even since Corey had suggested the idea of multiple robots in different places, Alexis had been worrying that one might come through her aunt's neighborhood. They weren't that far from the city, after all, in the grand scheme of things – just a few miles. It certainly wasn't a problem for the aliens who had come god knows how many light years to Earth to travel a few miles outside the city.

But she wasn't sure that they would. Some part of her was hoping that maybe they would stay in the city. Without knowing why they were there, she didn't know what they were going to do next – and as much as she didn't like just sitting around waiting for their next move, she didn't have much choice.

It wasn't like she had a car or anybody to drive her anyway. She didn't have her driver's license yet, and somehow she doubted Corey or her aunt would be willing to drive her back to Philly (which is where she wanted to go) even if they had a working car (which they didn't).

Suddenly something out the window caught her eye – a small shape, flying low in the sky. Alexis' heard jumped; had the military finally gotten its act together and sent in the cavalry? Then she noticed something off about the aircraft – it was small and hard to see clearly this far away, and she was hardly an expert, but it didn't look like any military plane she'd ever seen before.

She realized with a thrill of horror that it was an alien spacecraft, many times smaller than the ships they had come to Earth in, but still a craft of unmistakably alien design. She got up and walked over to the window, wanting to see it more clearly, but even as she approached she realized it was already too far away for her to get a good view of it; it was simply moving too quickly.

She watched out the window as it grew smaller and eventually faded somewhere near the horizon. _So much for them staying in the city_, she though morosely. She looked down, though nothing looked new down on the ground; she could see all of her aunt's back yard and some parts of the surrounding yards, but there was no one around. Alexis wondered if maybe everyone was still hiding like they were.

All of a sudden another alien spacecraft flew by, this one lower and closer than the other and coming _towards_ the house instead of away from it and o_h god, oh god, they found us, they know we're here_, the thoughts raced through her head. Alexis cried out and ducked below the window, squeezing her eyes shut, not wanting to see her own death.

Long seconds passed. Nothing happened.

Alexis opened her eyes and turned around, raising herself just far enough to see over the windowsill.

Nothing. The ship was gone, with not even a trace of a fuel trail to mark that it had been there.

She turned back around and sat down against the wall, willing her breathing to slow down.

_Aunt Rachel_.

Her eyes shot open as she realized that her aunt was out there. And there were alien ships flying right over their neighborhood. She could be in danger, she could be hurt or worse –

Alexis scrambled to get up and ran to the door, yanking it open. "Corey?!" she shouted as she sprinted down the stairs.

"Alex?"

She heard his voice emanating from the kitchen and ran towards it. She rounded the corner and almost ran straight into him; apparently he had starting coming towards her, too.

"Is she back yet?" she asked breathlessly, looking around behind him but seeing no one.

"Who, Aunt Rachel? Not yet; she's gonna be home any minute," he said, giving her a look of concern. "What's wrong? Are you okay?"

"I saw these ships…out the window…one was heading away from the city but the other I couldn't tell where it was heading, and they were really small, not like the motherships or whatever that they came in–"

"Hey, hey, slow down a sec. What kind of ships did you see?"

"That's what I'm telling you; I don't know! All I know is that Aunt Rachel is out there right now and we can't even call her on her cell phone to make sure she's okay. What if she's not okay?"

"You can't think like that," Corey told her firmly. "She's smart; I'm sure she knows to stay hidden from the aliens, especially in spaceships," he finished lightly.

Alexis closed her eyes and took a deep breath. He was right, of course. She was freaking out, and probably for nothing.

"Are you sure you're okay? You–" He hesitated, suddenly looking uncomfortable. "You look like you've been crying."

Alexis wiped her hands across her face, only now realizing that she hadn't properly cleaned herself up and there were probably still tear tracks on her face.

"No," she lied quickly. Maybe a little too quickly. "I-I'm just really tired." Not wanting to dwell on the topic, she continued quickly, "Where's Sara?" Now that she thought about it, she would have expected her cousin to have come running at the sound of Alexis yelling, but she had been downstairs for at least a minute now and Sara had yet to make her presence known.

"I gave her a coloring book and some crayons and sent her to Aunt Rachel and Uncle Todd's room." He paused. "You know, she was really upset at what you said. About Aunt Rachel."

"I know, and I'm sorry!" Alexis said, once again feeling like a heel. "But how am I supposed to _not_ worry, with aliens and robots going around killing people and their spaceships flying right over us!"

"Chill out; I get that you're worried. But you can't let her know that."

Alexis stared at the floor for a moment. "How? How do I _not_ freak out about everything that's happened?"

He gave her a wry half-smile. "Go fish."

She snorted. "Great, thanks. Big help you've been," she said, turning to leave.

"Hey," he said, and she turned back around. "She's gonna be back soon."

"I hope so," Alexis said, turning and walking away. _Before anything else happens_, she thought darkly as she went up the stairs. She paused at Aunt Rachel and Uncle Todd's room, staring at the doorknob for a moment before moving on. Sara wasn't going to want to see her right now; she'd probably just make things worse if she tried talking to her now. Better to wait a little longer.

Alexis closed the door to her room as soon as she was inside, wondering how an already bad weekend had gotten even worse in such a short amount of time. _Oh, that's right; you opened your big fat mouth, that's how_, she scolded herself.

Sighing, she got out her book and laid down on the bed, intending to lose herself in its pages and forget about the ever-worsening clusterfuck that was her life.

* * *

><p>AN: I've been able to make a lot more progress on this lately than in the past and that makes me happy, seeing as I'm a chronic procrastinator and always reluctant to share my writing. I really do want to improve as a writer, so please drop me a line if you have any constructive criticism or any other comments about the story. Thanks for reading!


	11. Chapter 11: The Last Supper

Alexis flipped her book open and dove in. The story was a welcome distraction, even if it wasn't the most original. It had magic and adventures in faraway places, and it was all very far removed from her own unpalatable reality. She always found it easy to get lost in a good book and was pleased to find that even today refused to be an exception.

After a while, though, she realized that, aside from the occasional odd noise, the house was eerily quiet. She still wasn't used to the distinct lack of background noise normally provided by modern technology. It was starting to make Alexis nervous and maybe even a little jumpy.

She gave the closed door a worried look as a sudden desire to go out and make sure Corey and Sara were still there came over her. She shook her head and scolded herself for being so needy. She'd already tried playing nice with them once today, and it hadn't exactly worked out well. She'd made Sara cry (or at least close to it) and made Corey mad (nothing new there).

Alexis perked up at a sudden noise. Was that the wind again? It was a fairly windy day, and the wind had disturbed her reading many times already. It didn't sound like the previous times, though…and there it was again. Then she realized what it was – the back door opening and closing. _It must be Aunt Rachel_.

Abandoning her self-enforced exile, she shoved the bookmark in her book and dropped it on the bed, going downstairs as quickly as she could without running. She needed to see _right now_ that her aunt was okay. As soon as she opened the bedroom door, she noticed the smells, but when she rounded the corner into the kitchen downstairs, it hit her like a wall, reminding her of big family dinners. Glancing around the room, Alexis saw a few covered dishes on various counters and wondered where all the food had come from – then she breathed a sigh of relief as she caught sight of her aunt rifling through a backpack sitting on one of the chairs. She looked all right, at least.

"Hey," she called out, not really sure what to say now. She suddenly felt silly for worrying so much earlier.

Her aunt looked up and smiled at her, but she seemed distracted. "Alex, hi. How are you?" And wasn't that a loaded question.

"I'm fine," she said, not wanting to open any more cans of worms today. "Where did all this food come from?" she asked, looking at the half dozen dishes littering the counters. "And how did it get cooked? Is the power back on?"

"No, I asked Corey to cook some of the things in the freezer." Alexis looked sharply at Corey to ask him about that, but her aunt continued before she could say anything and started taking things out of her backpack. "After today we can't eat anything left in there. It's been warming up for too long now and won't be safe. We'll have to clean it out later. Don't want spoiled food in the house."

Alexis looked at the items her aunt was putting on the table. Packs of AAAs, AAs, and 9V batteries. Three large Maglite flashlights. Four smaller flashlights. Boxes and bottles of various medications. A box of gauze. Several boxes of different sized bandages. A pack of X Acto knives.

"Aunt Rachel, what's all this for?" Alexis asked, bewildered. "And where did you get it? Where did you go?"

"I went to the store," she replied casually. "We don't know how long all of this is going to last, so I figured we should stay on top of things, keep things around that we might need."

"There are stores open right now?" Alexis asked incredulously.

"No," her aunt said, pausing for a second as she finished unloading the backpack. "I left an IOU."

"Wait, you broke in and stole this stuff?" Alexis said, horrified.

"I have every intention of paying for all these things, with interest if needed, after all this is over – but until then we may need some of these things to get by," her aunt replied firmly. "Now, I've known the store owner for years – he's a good friend of mine – and I know he'd be okay with me borrowing these things as long as I pay for them later. And before you ask, he wasn't there or I would have asked him myself. Here," she said, handing Alexis one of the packs of batteries. "I need you to open this and load them into the flashlights. I have to put these other things away." Scooping up everything but the flashlights and the batteries, Rachel left the room and headed upstairs.

Alexis stared after her, a look of disbelief on her face. The aunt she had looked up to for her entire life had just stolen things from a closed store. She could dress it up however she wanted, but it was still theft to Alexis.

She looked at Corey, who was uncovering one of the dishes – some kind of kabob. "Did you know she was going to steal all that stuff?" It came out a little harsher than she'd meant it, but she couldn't bring herself to redact the question.

Corey shrugged without looking at her. "I didn't ask. Doesn't matter anyway as long as she pays it back later."

"How could you not ask?" Alexis said, exasperated. "Don't you care at all? She just _stole_ that stuff!"

Corey finally turned to her, the look of anger on his face surprising her. "Alex, I just spent the last few hours cooking the only stuff I could salvage from the freezer – the only stuff I was fairly certain wouldn't _kill _us or make us really sick if we ate it – while you just moped in your room, doing god knows what, while Aunt Rachel possibly risked her life going out and getting stuff for us to make all of this a little bit easier. From where I'm standing, I'm not the one who doesn't care."

He turned back to the counter, crumpling up the tin foil that had been covering the kabob and chucking it blindly at the trash can in the corner. Alexis half expected it to go in, it was that close, but at the last second it bounced off the edge and onto the floor. He glanced over at it, made a little disgusted noise, and turned back to the food.

Alexis watched him for a moment, unsure if that meant the conversation was over. She looked around the room, not sure what to do, her eyes finally coming to rest on the ball of tin foil. Walking over to it, she picked it up and dropped it easily into the trash can. "Two points," she said lightly, looking at Corey to gauge his reaction.

He rolled his eyes, but his expression was softer than before. "Only way you were gonna make it is if I helped you out by getting it so close. You know I own you on the court if we play fair."

Alexis knew that, but she wasn't going to admit it. "Yeah, right," she snorted. Then, doing a 180 and continuing before she could change her mind, she said, "You know I would have helped you out with all of this, right? I mean, I'm not exactly Rachael Ray, but you're not exactly Gordon Ramsay either. It's not like you couldn't have used the help." She made a face as he uncovered something that she thought was supposed to be grilled cheese.

He saw the look on her face. "Hey, you don't have to eat it. More for the rest of us," he shrugged.

Now it was her turn to roll her eyes. "I should be able to survive one meal from you. It might send me in the ER, but I'll survive," she teased back. She paused, realizing that she actually was hungry. "So…when are we eating?"

"As soon as we're all settled down," Aunt Rachel said, entering the kitchen with empty arms. "Alex, can you set the table, and Corey, can you move these dishes to the table? I'm going to go get Sara."

Without a word Alexis moved to the cupboard with the plates and started getting them out, and when they sat down in the dining room a few minutes later, Alexis did her best to play nice and not bring up the _larceny_ her aunt had committed earlier that day.

It was easy to avoid the subject at first – in fact it was easy to avoid pretty much everything that had happened over the past few days. All Sara wanted to do was show them the things she'd been drawing and coloring, and while Alexis didn't really care about a six-year-old's drawings, she did appreciate the excuse not to discuss her aunt's criminal activities.

Alexis bit into her grilled cheese and made a face at the taste of slightly burnt bread as Sara shoved yet another piece of paper at their aunt. "It's the cyberman from the mall," she said, her voice abruptly losing the enthusiasm it had held when she explained her other drawings.

Alexis looked at her cousin as she explained the picture. "All the people are running, but they're not running fast enough. It's going to kill them." Suddenly Sara was crying and Alexis couldn't do anything but watch as their aunt got up and knelt down beside Sara's chair, pulling Sara into a tight hug and murmuring words of comfort.

"Can one of you get the tissues," their aunt said after a few seconds, and Corey, who was closer to the living room, got them and set them on the table beside Sara. Aunt Rachel took a few and helped Sara clean herself up – not that it did much good, Alexis thought, as the tears seemed to just keep coming.

"Hey," Corey called to Alexis in a low voice, clearly not wanting to disturb their aunt and cousin. He nodded to the dishes on the table. "Let's start cleaning this up, they might be a while."

Alexis reluctantly and started taking dishes out to the kitchen, starting with her own plate and silverware. She knew she wasn't being helpful, just sitting there at the table, but she wanted to be there for Sara somehow. She might be annoying sometimes, but she certainly didn't deserve any of this. She didn't deserve to be crying in the next room. She didn't deserve to have seen people _murdered_.

She shuddered, remembering the terror she had felt when the cyberman had chased them through the mall. Of course, it hadn't been after them specifically, or Alexis was certain it would have killed them. It had just been coming after the crowd, but that was close enough.

By the time they were done clearing the table, Aunt Rachel had gotten Sara calmed down enough to take her upstairs, where Alexis assumed Sara would be going to sleep. It was still early, but the youngster had looked downright exhausted, cradled in Aunt Rachel's arms as they went upstairs. It wasn't surprising, considering how hard she had been crying. Alexis thought she might still be crying, too, but it was hard to tell.

Sitting down at the now-clear dining room table, Alexis rested her head in her hands, wondered what was next. She wondered when all of this was going to end, when they'd see their family again, when they'd be allowed to properly go outside again, when they'd be able to go _home_.

Corey sat down across from her, looking a little lost as well. When he caught sight of her looking at him, his face took on a lighter expression and he gave her a little smile. If she hadn't seen his face just a few seconds before, she would have thought the smile was genuine. She suddenly wondered how many times in all of this he had smiled when he wasn't really okay.

She looked up as her aunt came back down the stairs, sans niece, and sat down in one of the chairs with a heavy sigh. She looked at the two of them, holding each of their gazes for a moment before looking down at the table. Alexis wondered what she was thinking. Finally she looked up at them again.

"We need to talk."

* * *

><p>AN: This ended up being one of the shorter chapters, for which I apologize, especially considering how long ago the last chapter was posted, but I am already working on the next one, so hopefully the wait for the next one won't be nearly as long. As always, please review if you have anything to say (as long as it's not flames), and thanks for reading!


	12. Chapter 12: State of the Union

"We need to talk."

It was four little words, but they never meant anything good, and Alexis almost left the room right then and there – but in the end she couldn't think of a good excuse besides that she really didn't want to hear anything that was going to make her day worse. So she stayed silent and waited for her aunt to continue.

Aunt Rachel looked down at the table for a moment. "That might have been the last really nice supper we have for a while." _Well at least we're starting on a positive note, _Alexis thought sarcastically. "And I'm sorry if that does end up being the case, but we'll just have to make do. A lot of things are going to be different for a while, actually," she said, looking up at them once again.

Alexis couldn't contain her curiosity anymore; it was like her aunt was purposefully milking the suspense. "Like what?"

"Like how we get things that we need," her aunt replied, looking at her pointedly. "I know you don't like how I took those things from the store; neither do I. But I have a feeling things are going to get worse before they get better, and we need to be prepared. We can't think in terms of what we might have done before; we need to focus on the here and now and what we need to do to get by."

"You mean by stealing," Alexis said rudely. She couldn't help it; this whole conversation was ridiculous. How could her aunt think it was okay to steal?

"If necessary," her aunt said sharply. "And _only_ when necessary. The authorities – the police, the military – they're not in a position to help us right now. Help might not come for a while. We have to assume that we're on our own, at least for now. And we need to make sure we have all the necessities until order is restored."

"What did you see out there?" Corey asked suddenly, and Alexis realized that in her anger she'd almost forgotten that her aunt had been beyond the backyard today. She couldn't decide whether or not she wanted to hear about what was going on in the city around them, but it was decided for her as her aunt continued.

"Not much," she admitted, hesitating. "But enough. I don't want to worry you, but you need to understand that things are already a little rough out there in some spots," she said, looking each of them in the eye. "Not a lot of people are out on the streets – I think everyone's worried about the aliens showing up – but I saw evidence of vandalism, looting, things like that, the whole way to the store and back."

"It's the end of the freaking world; you'd think people would try to work together more, not hurt each other," Alexis said, disgusted and a little shocked that people would act that way.

"Most of the people around here are probably scared," her aunt said simply, "and people do stupid, even cruel things when they're scared. I'm sure some people are going to use the situation to their advantage; remember the man who stole the car?" _As if I could forget,_ Alexis thought. "We just need to be extra cautious, which means staying inside like we have been and keeping all the things we need stocked, just in case we have to hunker down for a while."

"We already are 'hunkering down'," Alexis pointed out, wincing at the expression. "And how are we going to get things if we can't go outside and all the stores are closed anyway? Are you going to go break into more stores?" It came out a little more rudely than she'd intended. Of course.

"If I have to," her aunt said firmly, "I will go out and get what we need to get by." Her expression softened and she gave Alexis a sympathetic look. "I know it isn't ideal. But this what we have to do. With any luck, everything will be back to normal before you know it."

But nothing changed and things didn't go back to normal – at least not the normal that Alexis wanted. A new sort of normal emerged instead in which their aunt alternated between rushing around the house in busy-body mode and disappearing for hours at a time (Alexis preferred not to think about where she was going or what she was doing) and Sara annoying Alexis nearly constantly. Alexis didn't even know what Corey was doing with his time, but for the most part she didn't care. Sara's continuous attention meant that Alexis rarely got enough time to herself, and after a while it started to wear her down.

"No, I don't want to play War with you," Alexis said for the third time in as many minutes. Sara was standing in front of her, a deck of cards in her hand and a pout on her face. She'd woken Alexis up a few minutes ago, trying to solicit a game of cards from her. Alexis could tell by the light barely filtering through the curtains that it was _way_ too early to be up, but she was trying very hard not to let her crankiness at that fact enter the conversation. "Maybe Corey'll play with you," she said a little desperately. She just wanted to go back to sleep for a little longer. It wasn't like she had anything to be up for.

"But Corey's going out with Aunt Rachel." Sara's pout, if anything, grew deeper.

"He is?" Alexis started, sitting up in bed. "Did they leave yet?" She glanced at the door, realizing she hadn't heard anything from downstairs in a while. Not that she'd really been listening.

"I dunno," Sara shrugged. "They said they were gonna leave, so I came to find you."

"Wait here," Alexis said shortly, jumping up and quickly going downstairs.

She found her aunt and brother in the kitchen, two backpacks on the table between them. Her brother looked up as she came in and her aunt turned around.

"Hi. What are you guys doing?" Alexis asked suspiciously, glancing back and forth between them. She decided not to waste any time with niceties, and so what if it came out a little more accusingly than she intended. It looked like they were about five seconds from being out the door, so at least she'd caught them in time.

"I'm taking Corey to the store with me," her aunt replied.

"And, what, you just weren't going to tell me?" Alexis asked incredulously.

"No, because she knew you'd freak out, just like this," Corey said, exasperated.

"And you didn't think I would have freaked out if I'd woken up and both of you were gone?" Alexis shot back. "If there'd been no one here but Sara, and I had no idea where you'd gone or when you'd be back or anything? God," she finished softly. Did they seriously think she'd be okay with them leaving her alone during an alien invasion?

"You don't have to worry, Alex," her aunt reassured her. "We're just going out to get a few things. We were planning on getting back before you even woke up; obviously Sara threw a bit of a wrench in that," she finished, giving Alexis a wry smile.

So it was true. They were ready to go out and leave her there and not even _tell_ her. "I want to go with you," she blurted out. She didn't want to be left behind while they got to go out. She might be an indoor person in general, but even she was starting to get cabin fever after almost a week straight of not going out beyond her aunt's yard.

"You can't. Sara needs someone to stay here with her," Corey argued.

"It's okay, Corey," Aunt Rachel said. "Now that Alex is awake anyway, she can come with me. Can you look after Sara until we get back?"

Corey sighed, deflating. "Sure," he said, a look of irritation on his face as he left the room in a manner Alexis could only describe as sulking.

Alexis watched his retreating form. "I didn't mean to keep him from going," she told Rachel, a little frustrated. She didn't want Corey to be mad at her, and he would be after this.

"Well, I'm not taking Sara, and I can't leave her home alone," her aunt replied briskly. "He can come next time. It's probably good for both of you to get out anyway, and it doesn't really matter who goes first."

Well, when she put it that way… "Okay, so where are we going?" Alexis felt a little silly asking now, but she had jumped so quickly on the opportunity to go out that she hadn't really thought about where they would actually _go_ after they left the house.

"We're going grocery shopping. It's a little bit warmer today than the last few days, so I figured it was a good day to take someone with me," Aunt Rachel said, giving Alexis a quick once-over. "Do you want to change first though?"

Alexis looked down at herself. She'd woken up about ten minutes ago and was still wearing the yoga pants she'd worn to bed and her shirt from yesterday. "Umm…yeah, gimme a minute," she said, running out of the room and upstairs. She changed in record time – to her last pair of clean pants, she realized ruefully as she pulled them on. She'd have to ask Aunt Rachel about getting some more of her clothes washed later. Rachel had somehow gotten a few things washed the other day (though Alexis had no clue how, seeing as the washer and dryer, along with everything else that plugged into a wall, still weren't working), but apparently she was running out of clothes again.

When Alexis got back down to the kitchen, she found her aunt leaning against one of the counters, backpack on. Alexis shouldered the other one as her aunt pulled away from the counter.

"Before we head out," Aunt Rachel began, "there are a few ground rules."

"Okay…" Alexis said cautiously.

"Number one," her aunt held up one finger, "if I tell you to do something, you do it, no questions asked. Number two," she held up a second finger, "we need to make as little noise as possible, so no talking unless something important comes up. Three – stick with me. No wandering off. I want you right beside me the whole time we're out. And four – if anything bad happens, run. Just run away. Find a safe place to hide or come back here. I don't want you getting hurt, okay?"

"Is it that dangerous out there?" Alexis glanced at the door, worried by the strict rules her aunt was laying down for what she thought was going to be a simple trip out.

"Only if you're not careful. I'm just covering all our bases," her aunt replied. "Let's get going."

Leaving the house was…odd. Alexis hadn't been anywhere beyond the backyard in almost a week, and even without the normal comforts of central air and heating, she'd been sheltered by the house from the elements more than she'd realized. Now, she stuck to any pavement or stoned walkway they came across in an effort not to ruin her shoes from the damp grass from the rain that had fallen the past few days. There hadn't been much, but it was just enough to make the ground soft and get her shoes dirty if she stepped in it. Alexis was grateful it wasn't raining now at least. It was actually fairly pleasant out, if a little disconcerting from the lack of people or normal sounds of traffic.

She wrinkled her nose at a dead worm on the sidewalk in the park they were walking through, giving it a wide berth, and decided to break the silence. "So what are we 'shopping' for?" she asked, not putting nearly as much bite into the word as she wanted to. She might be annoyed at the situation, but she didn't want to anger her aunt.

"I'll tell you when we get there; no talking for now, okay?" her aunt replied softly, just loudly enough for Alexis to hear.

"Okay," she whispered back, but only so that her aunt wouldn't get angry. She thought it was stupid that they weren't talking; they hadn't seen a single other person outside the entire time, and they'd been walking for at least ten minutes. And it was at least another ten minutes until they got to their destination. Alexis didn't even realize they were there until her aunt stopped and turned to her.

"Is this it?" Alexis whispered, a little confused. They were under an awning attached to a multi-story building, maybe an office. She thought she remembered seeing some kind of business logo on the other side, and it definitely didn't look like a grocery store.

"The store's just around the corner," Aunt Rachel replied softly, nodding in the direction they had been going before they stopped. "I just need to make sure we're on the same page about everything before we go in. No talking or making noise; do what I tell you when I tell you, no arguments; and most importantly, if anything happens, I need you to get out as quickly as you can. Got it?"

"Got it," Alexis agreed readily, eager to get the show on the road. The walk had done her cabin fever some good, but she was still restless.

"Good." Her aunt nodded and they set off across two more parking lots before coming to the automatic doors of a Whole Foods. One of the doors was ajar, probably enough for Alexis to get through if she wanted, but not her aunt. Rachel pulled on it, teasing it open a bit further. "Let's go," she told Alexis, stepping inside.

Alexis watched her aunt in bewilderment. "I thought you said we were going to your friend's store," she accused.

"Not today," Aunt Rachel said from just inside the door. "Come on, come inside and I'll explain."

Alexis hesitated outside and gave her aunt, who was standing in the atrium of the building she'd just _forced entry into_, a look of outrage.

"Get inside, Alex." Aunt Rachel's tone went from soft and coaxing to firm and commanding in an instant, and it startled her. "Right now."

Alexis scrambled inside, looking at her aunt in shock. She had never heard that tone from her aunt before.

"Follow me," Aunt Rachel commanded. Alexis followed her aunt without a word, not wanting to make her any angrier. She led Alexis along the outer edge of the store; they passed the bakery, the deli, the meat section, and they just kept going. Alexis had to hold her breath to get past the meat section without vomiting from the smell of rotting meat. There were a lot more bugs on the floor and in the air than she was used to seeing in grocery stores, too, and Alexis realized that a lot of places were probably like this, the neglect already apparent as the employees didn't come in every day to maintain the businesses. Alexis wondered if anyone had actually been there since the day the aliens attacked. Probably not, from the state of the store, Alexis reasoned.

They had passed along two of the walls and started down the third when Alexis really started to wonder where they were going. She wasn't sure how mad her aunt was, though, so she stayed silent while her aunt led on. Aunt Rachel kept on glancing down each aisle as they passed, as if looking for something. Alexis thought it might help if she knew what her aunt was looking for, but then again, maybe not, since she didn't know the store.

Finally, they had walked all four walls and were at the front doors again. Alexis turned to her aunt, ready to disregard the no-talking order and ask her what in the world they were doing, but her aunt beat her to it.

"Okay, we can talk now. I had to make sure no one else was here," Aunt Rachel explained. "But we still need to be quiet so we can hear if anyone comes inside."

"Okay," Alexis conceded. "So why are we here and not at your friend's store? The one you said wouldn't mind if we, you know, temporarily stole things?"

"His place was cleaned out a few days ago," Rachel told her. "It was a small store and a lot of it was fresh food. This was the next closest place with a definite stock of non-perishable groceries." She started walking down one of the aisles.

Remembering what Rachel had said about staying right beside her, Alexis followed closely behind while her aunt stopped a few feet into the aisle and unshouldered her backpack. Trying to ignore the feeling that what they were doing was very wrong, Alexis said evenly, "Okay. So what are we here to get?"

"Whatever we can," Aunt Rachel replied. "Focusing on foods high in nutrition and energy. This aisle is all the pasta – the carbs are good for energy, and it'll keep pretty much indefinitely."

So they shoved a dozen or so thin boxes of spaghetti into her aunt's bag, moving down the aisle and grabbing various other pastas off the shelves as they went. Then they went a few aisles down and grabbed a couple of large containers of nuts and stuffed them in her bag, too. After that they found the soups and started loading up Alexis' bag, toping it off with a few random baking items. Looking at all of the ingredients her aunt was having her put into her backpack, Alexis hoped her aunt knew how to cook, because she definitely did not. She was pretty much useless in the kitchen.

After both of their backpacks were filled, Aunt Rachel pulled more bags out of the front pouch of her backpack. They were those reusable canvas bags they had at supermarkets to replace the plastic ones. _The corporate world's attempt to appear "green" to ingratiate themselves with their environmentally conscious customers,_ was the thought somewhere in the back of Alexis' mind. They filled those, too, with even more food, and Alexis started to wonder just how long her aunt thought they were going to be living in the Stone Age.

It wasn't long before they'd filled both backpacks and all four of the canvas bags as well. "How are we supposed to get all this back to your house?" Alexis asked. It was hard enough just moving them throughout the store; Alexis was starting to realize just how hard the 20-minute walk back to the house was going to be.

"We carry them," Aunt Rachel replied, and Alexis hadn't meant _that_, she knew _that_, but her aunt continued before she could say anything. "Put one on each shoulder – it'll help keep you balanced – and let me know if it gets to be too heavy."

Alexis sighed heavily but didn't protest, pulling her backpack up off the ground. She suddenly stopped mid-motion, only one arm through the straps, when she heard a noise from the front of the store.

"Wait," she whispered, "I just heard something."

Her aunt froze. "Where?"

"At the front, where we came in," Alexis replied. She looked in that direction, but of course there were several aisles between them and the doors, so she couldn't see anything.

Aunt Rachel followed her gaze, then looked back at her. "What did it sound like?"

"I don't know, just…like something moved around," Alexis whispered back, a little frustrated. She slipped her other arm through the other strap slowly, securing the backpack on her back, still listening, and made to move towards the end of the aisle, when a hand came down on her shoulder.

"Alex."

She turned to look at her aunt.

"Wait here. I'm going to see who it is. You stay here, and if anything happens, I need you to run away; just get back home to Corey and Sara. Understood?"

Alex looked again in the direction of the doors, wishing she could see through solid objects. "Okay," she said, hoping her aunt was just being paranoid. Not _everyone_ could be out to get them, after all.

She watched her aunt walk down the aisle and disappear around the corner. Even if it was just her aunt being paranoid, it was starting to affect Alexis as well. As the seconds passed, Alexis felt herself growing more and more anxious. She tried telling herself that her aunt was only a few aisles away and that she was fine, and it worked…

Until she heard the scream.

* * *

><p>AN: Longest chapter yet by word count, woohoo! Hope it was worth the extra words…send me a review if you have anything to say (minus flames) and thanks again for reading!


	13. Chapter 13: Sticks and Stones

Alexis froze for an instant, then dropped the bags she'd been trying to get situated on her shoulders and ran down the aisle towards the front of the store. Rounding the corner, she saw her aunt leaning with one hand on a display, the other hand clutching her leg.

"Are you okay?" Alexis called out as she ran up to her aunt as best as she could with the backpack still on her back. She looked around but didn't see anyone else.

"I'll be fine," her aunt answered breathlessly. "It was just a dog. He startled me and I think I startled him, too. He ran off," she said, pointing towards the door.

"Why was there a dog running loose in here?" Alexis wondered out loud.

"Maybe his owners aren't around to take care of him. He was probably attracted to the smell of the food; with the doors open, I'm sure a number of animals have been in and out of here."

Alexis looked down at her aunt's leg. "Are you hurt?"

"Nothing too bad," Aunt Rachel said, looking down at her torn pants. She shook her head and gave a little laugh. "I'm a little more high-strung right now than I realized…he came running out of one of the aisles and almost hit me; I rushed to get out of the way and hit the kiosk here and scraped my leg. It should be fine."

Alexis breathing a sigh of relief, grateful that her aunt was okay. She'd had a moment of utter panic when she'd heard the scream, not knowing what kind of trouble her aunt might be in. Her first thought had been that the aliens had found them. Alexis shuddered at the thought. "Can we go now?" She'd had enough excitement for the day and was ready to get back to the house.

"Yes, we should get going," Aunt Rachel replied. "I'm hoping no one heard my little-girl scream a minute ago," she added jokingly, "but if they did, we should probably clear out before they come to investigate."

So they gathered their bags and left, Aunt Rachel limping slightly. Alexis felt bad for her, but she couldn't think of any way to help except by taking her aunt's bags, and she was already weighed down with a backpack and two full bags of her own.

Instead of turning left outside and heading back they way they came, her aunt started walking towards the street. "Aunt Rachel?" Alexis said, confused. "Where are you going?" Alexis had a terrible sense of direction, but even she knew they hadn't come from there.

Her aunt stopped a few feet ahead of her and turned around. "There's a CVS right over there." She pointed across the street. "I'm going to get a few things there for my leg."

"Oh," Alexis replied, moving to catch up with her aunt.

It didn't take her aunt long to find what she needed and bandage up her leg. Alexis turned away as her aunt shamelessly pulled down her jeans to access the wound and bandage it up. Once her aunt was satisfied, they set out for the house.

The trip back took far longer than the trip out (she couldn't be sure exactly how long without a watch) and they had to stop to rest several times along the way. The bags were heavy and Alexis wasn't exactly a champion weightlifter, so it wasn't a pleasant trip. She certainly didn't envy her aunt, though; she probably had more muscle than Alexis, but at the moment she was limping along with an injured leg. Even though the weather was the best it had been since they'd arrived in Boston, Alexis soon broke into a sweat and after a few minutes her muscles started to ache. Every time she felt like complaining, though, she'd look over to say something and see her aunt limping slightly and swallow her complaint.

Five minutes into the walk home, Alexis was regretting going with her aunt at all, and by the time they rounded the last corner and come to her aunt's street, Alexis was ready for a long, cool shower. Since she knew she wasn't getting that with the power still out, she decided that she was going to try for a lazy afternoon; she'd certainly done enough work this morning to deserve it. She was sure she was going to be sore for a few day after this.

As soon as they got inside the house, Alexis dropped her bags by the kitchen table and sat down heavily in one of the chairs. She was absolutely exhausted – and hungry. They'd left so quickly that she hadn't even thought about breakfast at the time, and on the way home she had begun to regret it. _That's what you get when you don't plan ahead,_ she chastised herself.

Aunt Rachel sat down in the chair across from her and closed her eyes. Alexis watched her for a moment, taking in the pinched look on her aunt's face. She wanted to ask her about the whole shower thing but didn't think her aunt would want to answer her right now. Alexis was in the middle of thinking up a good space cadet comment to break the silence when Corey came in.

"I'm glad you guys are back, I was starting to get worried," Corey said, sounding genuinely relieved. He raised his eyebrows at the bags. "You guys carried all this back from the store?"

"Yeah, and I think there's enough food here to feed an army for a week," Alexis replied, pleased with how much they had carried back, even if she wasn't pleased with how they'd gotten it. "We shouldn't need to go out again before things are back to normal, right, Aunt Rachel?"

"Mmm," her aunt said noncommittally, inspecting the bandage through her torn pant leg.

"What happened to your leg?" Corey asked suddenly, sounding worried.

"It's just a cut," she replied tiredly. "I'm going to go re-bandage it; can you start putting the groceries away?"

"Sure," Corey said as she started to get up.

"Don't worry about fitting everything in the kitchen – just put things where you can and fill up the cupboards. I'll put the rest away in the garage when I come back down."

Alexis watched her aunt leave the room, still trying to muster up the will to move from her chair. She reached into one of the bags, fishing around for a moment before finding a box of protein bars. Opening it up, she unwrapped a bar and took a big bite of it as she watched Corey go to her aunt's bags and start unloading things onto the table. It wasn't exactly the eggs benedict she wanted, but hopefully it would give her the energy she was looking for. It wasn't even noon and she already wanted the day to be over. After a few days of little to no physical exertion, the morning of gathering things and then carrying the heavy loads back to the house had wiped her out.

By the time she was done with the protein bar and could even think about getting up, Corey had unpacked and put away about half of the groceries. She was about to get up and start putting things away when Corey shut the last cupboard and turned to leave, stopping in the doorway and turning to look at her. "Thanks for helping put all this stuff away, Alex, I really appreciated it."

"Well, excuse me," she said indignantly. "I had to eat _something_. I was practically starving; I didn't eat breakfast this morning. And I would've helped; you just got to it before I did."

"Yeah, just like you "helped" today at the grocery store?" Corey shot back, still standing in the doorway.

Alexis looked at him, confused. "What the hell are you talking about? I _did_ help at the store today! Do you know how hard it was, carrying all that back here? It took forever and I feel like my body might never forgive me," she said miserably.

"Aunt Rachel got hurt," he said, giving her what she could only describe as a dirty look. She thought he was being ridiculous.

"That wasn't my fault," she said, outraged at what he was implying. "Some dumb dog ran at her and she hit this kiosk thing in the store. I wasn't even near her when it happened!"

"Exactly," he fumed, and Alexis realized that he was even angrier than she had originally thought. "She got hurt, and where were you exactly?" He shook his head. "Never mind, it doesn't matter. _This_ is why I should have been the one to go with her today. Every time any of us step outside that door now," he pointed to the back door, "we're risking our lives. Do you get that? The aliens are still out there, and they could be anywhere. What if it'd been one of them instead of a dog? What if Aunt Rachel had _died_? What then?"

"Well, I'm sorry that I don't have what it takes to go fucking _grocery shopping_ with Aunt Rachel!" she replied, furious. "You can go with her next time, and just leave me here, then!"

Alexis got up quickly, ignoring the immediate protests from all over her body, and stormed out of the room before he could say anything else. Maybe he wouldn't have said anything anyway. It wouldn't have mattered to Alexis if he had; she was so furious she barely thought about what she was doing or where she was found.

She found herself a moment later in the bedroom she'd been using for the past week or so. She slammed the door, imagining it was Corey's face instead. Not that she could ever actually do anything like that and get away with it – Mr. Athlete versus the bookworm? She wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell. And slamming the door, while satisfying, didn't help rid her of any of her anger. If anything, she just wanted to slam something else now, too.

She realized after a few minutes of sitting on the bed fuming that she was sitting on the bed fuming and that it was just not making her feel any better about the whole situation. She approached the desk and started going through the things of hers that were on it. A book, finished the second day they were in Boston. Her other book, finished yesterday. Her laptop, which had run out of battery a few days ago.

Her eyes settled on her journal, tucked neatly underneath the two books she'd brought along. The groceries were as put away as they were going to get, and Alexis didn't think she'd be wanted downstairs anyway…

She sat down and began to write.

Things didn't get any easier after that, but they did settle back into a routine. Aunt Rachel still disappeared usually once a day, and Corey often went with her. Alexis didn't ask to go along again after that first time. She was so angry at him after that argument that it took almost an entire day before she spoke to him again, and she didn't feel like repeating that any time soon. The house was too small for that.

Corey and Alexis ended up preparing most of the meals, though Corey bore the brunt of it since most of it required the use of the small grill outside and her aunt didn't want her going outside at all. Alexis wasn't sure if her aunt was being sexist or ageist or if she just didn't trust her, but she bit her tongue because it meant less cooking that she had to do.

Of course, that meant she had other chores instead. Her aunt had her cleaning the house almost daily, although maybe "cleaned" wasn't quite the right word, with no vacuum and no running water. Her aunt kept them supplied with water that she claimed was clean, but it was in buckets and gallon jugs and Alexis didn't know where it came from. She almost asked her aunt a few times, but ended up deciding each time that ignorance was bliss. For now she just went along with it because, really, what other choice did she have?

Bathing and washing things was awkward, but they managed. The trick was to keep everything segregated – the clean things on the clean surfaces and in the clean areas, and the dirty things in different place. Considering Alexis was borderline OCD anyway (at least according to her family), these tasks suited her well, even if she would never admit it. She would have preferred to go out with her aunt more, but she didn't care for the heavy lifting and physical exertion that that seemed to involve.

Alexis found herself involved more and more in the day-to-day chores as the days went on. She was upset at first when she finished both of her books, knowing that she was out of good reading material until she got back home (her aunt's library consisted mostly of romance novels and medical textbooks; the former were of no interest to her and the latter only some interest), but she seemed to have less and less time to dwell on it with each day that passed.

Or maybe it was just less energy. When she did have time free from chores, it was often spent with Sara, trying to keep her occupied and out of trouble. And when she finally got some spare moments to herself beyond that, she would write, mostly in her journal about what was happening. Her journal was the closest thing to the listening ear of a good friend that she was going to get for a while, seeing as most of her real friends were in a different state. Corey was the only one in the house even remotely close to her in age, but he was _Corey_, not a friend she could talk to.

She thought about her parents, and the rest of the family, every day, usually more than once each day, and sometimes out of the blue. She'd be washing something or cleaning something or just walking down the hall when BAM – they would come into her mind and she would wonder where they were right now, or if they were even still alive. The thought made her stomach tie up in knots. Alexis chose to believe they were alive, even though she recognized that she had absolutely no rational reason to believe it. She didn't believe in all that psychic crap, but she still thought she would somehow feel it if they were dead. She couldn't imagine a world without them.

She mentioned it to Corey a few times, but those conversations were brief and they never stayed on the topic for very long; Corey usually always changed the subject after a minute or two. She started to think that Corey thought they were dead, even though he never said it aloud. Alexis almost wished he would; it would give her a good excuse to yell at him. Her anger and frustration at the whole situation was hard to contain sometimes, and journaling only helped so much. She almost wanted an excuse to lash out at someone, but she managed to keep her anger in check, for the most part.

One thing that helped distract her were her aunt's lessons in first aid. The incident at the grocery store had inspired her aunt to teach them some basic first aid. Alexis thought it was a moot point because their aunt knew what she was doing and would be able to care for them if they got sick or hurt, so what was the point of them learning all these things? She didn't complain, though, since it was good exercise for her brain; she felt like it was already turning to mush after only a few weeks without school and a few days without a good book.

Alexis thought it was absurd, though, when her aunt tried to get them to practice CPR on a dummy. She summoned Alexis and Corey to the living room one night after dinner about two weeks after the invasion. When Alexis walked in the room, she was surprised to see a life-sized dummy (sans arms and legs) laying on the floor in front of her aunt.

"Umm…Aunt Rachel?" Alexis said, furrowing her eyebrows at the dummy.

"We're practicing CPR today," her aunt replied before Alexis could continue. "I can tell you a million times how it's done, but nothing beats actually doing it, and you can't practice on a live person."

"Where did you even get that thing?" Alexis wondered out loud. She'd been through every part of this house multiple times as a result of their extended stay inside, and she'd never seen it.

"There's a training center for paramedics not too far from here," Aunt Rachel replied. "I picked it up from there. They weren't using it," she added a little wryly.

"You stole it," Alexis said before she could stop herself. Her tone was accusing and she immediately regretted saying it – not because she didn't think what her aunt had done was wrong, but because she didn't want to get into an argument with her aunt. Stocking up on food when they had no idea how long they'd be on lockdown was one thing, but stealing a dummy so that they could unnecessarily practice first aid was another!

"Not now, Alex," her aunt warned as Corey walked into the room with Sara. She turned to the two of them. "Sara, do you want to watch? We're going to practice saving Bob's life."

"Bob?" Corey raised his eyebrows.

"That's his name," Aunt Rachel said, pointing to a label on the bag that the dummy had apparently come in.

"How come he doesn't have any arms or legs?" Sara asked.

"Because he's just a CPR dummy," Aunt Rachel replied. "His arms and legs don't matter; just his chest and his head."

"You don't actually want us to do mouth-to-mouth on that thing, do you?" Alexis asked, more than a little grossed out.

"The only way to be sure you know how to do it correctly is by practicing it," was her aunt's reply.

"Yeah, but how many other people have put their mouths on that thing?" Alexis shuddered. "No, thank you."

"That's what these are for," her aunt said, holding up what looked like a napkin with a hole in the middle. "They keep your mouth from touching his. And I already sterilized his whole face, but if you want you can always do it again; there are some extra wipes here. Besides, what if Bob was real?" she asked, suddenly serious. "What if it was me? Or Corey? You wouldn't let him die because you were afraid of a few germs, do you?"

"That's worse," Alexis said, groaning. "I'd rather give mouth-to-mouth to the dummy any day."

"Thanks," Corey said sarcastically.

"Well, we'll work on the compressions first, then," Aunt Rachel said. "Sara, why don't you–"

The sound of glass breaking interrupted her mid-sentence. Alexis froze. The sound had come from the kitchen and Alexis' first thought was that maybe it was some kind of animal – maybe a bird had accidentally flown into the window. Even as she thought it, she knew it was ridiculous.

And then she heard the back door open.

* * *

><p>AN: Another cliffhanger! Yay! Let me know what you think if you have a moment and stay tuned!


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